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Hi, it’s me, a disabled researcher. I heard you wanted to learn how to “make better working conditions for disabled staff in higher education”, so I interviewed a few people. Join me as I talk to recruitment professionals, scholars, impact leaders and many more on Cripping Research Culture, a new podcast by the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV. Subscribe now to Cripping Research Culture wherever you listen to podcasts so you won’t miss a single episode.

Episode 1: Inclusive Creative Methods with Nicole Brown

Co-production and collaborative research are very important to today's university. But it takes a lot of work to make sure our methods are not harmfully extractive, taking from our partner communities without giving back to them.

In this episode of Cripping Research Culture, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and Daniel P. Jones interview Nicole Brown, an Associate Professor at the UCL Institute of Education in Culture, Communication, and Media. We discuss topics like:

• consent in co-production
• generating data vs collecting data
• making creative processes accessible to disabled people

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode!

British Sign Language Translation

Transcript

Nicole Brown: So I do also advocate for creative analysis or embodied analysis, so it’s not just about the data generation phase it’s also about, “OK, as researchers let’s tap into our own gut feeling and our own things and let’s have a look as to what the research data tells us and harness that”.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we ask the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of. and respect for, disabled staff. Today I am joined by my colleague, Daniel.

Daniel P. Jones: Hi, I’m Daniel P. Jones and I’m a white man with brown hair and glasses. Alongside Élaina I am one of the Research Associates on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Cultures project. In my work I focus mainly on inclusive research methods innovation, and producing guidance on the running of accessible events. As disabled researchers ourselves, the inclusion of disabled people in our ways of organizing, analyzing and generating knowledge, is more than theoretical.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: We hope you will join us for the next 8 episodes as we ask our colleagues about the practical steps we can take to make research culture anti-ableist. Make sure you stay til the end for our Crip Corner segment.

Daniel P. Jones: In today’s episode we talked to Nicole Brown about her use of Creative Methods in research.

Nicole Brown: Hello, thank you very much for having me and for inviting me to this podcast. My name is Nicole Brown. I am Associate Professor at University College London. I am a white woman with rather messy hair, they are curly so it’s always whatever they do rather than what I want them to do. I’m just really excited about having this conversation with you.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Creative Methods usually sound like a good idea for participants. It can be easier to talk about sensitive subjects while working with your hands for example, and sometimes you don’t need to talk at all to express yourself. But this doesn’t mean that Creative Methods are easy or straightforward to use. From a researcher’s perspective we asked Nicole about the tensions of using Creative Methods within the framework of traditional research protocols, including ethics processes.

I’ve been in situations and I’m a researcher where we do a zine activity as part of our research, and then on the fly they’re like “OK, well you don’t have to share it with anyone” or “we don’t have to take pictures of it”, “but if you want, like do it this way”. And I just felt like that felt a very like rushed, consent process, and like in front of everybody, where everyone is like “I’m fine sharing it with everyone”. And so like, yes in theory they tell you you can opt out, but it felt very much like “well I’ll do the polite thing and let the researcher take a picture of it”.

Nicole Brown: That’s really interesting and I agree with you that, you know there is obviously an element of peer pressure in that kind of situation already. So I have done that kind of activity as well where I’ve had like an ‘art workshop’ I called it. And it was a data generation activity – and you notice I’m talking data generation rather than data collection, because basically in that art workshop what I did was, I said to people that we would be generating the kind of information that I need in order to basically progress in my research and to respond to my research question, to answer my research question.

But what I did was, I did actually have that conversation before the workshop. So in the workshop everybody had already known where they were and where they stood and what the aim was. Also, what was also interesting is the art workshop itself was quite open in the sense that I literally just had like a massive table with loads of art materials thrown out, so it was actually quite a messy room.

And then I basically just said to people “when you come to my workshop there will be loads of materials there, go and do whatever takes your fancy to express the experiences that we need to have expressed, and use whatever materials there are”.

And that’s essentially what happened. People came into the room and were just playing with all of those different things. So some people would be sticking and glueing; other people used the stickers that were there so it was kind of more like, you know just like taking the backing off and sticking things down. Other people were painting. And then there were people doing Lego models. So it was quite a wide range of things that happened in the room.

And then, when it came to the sharing part, that was the point where everybody had already made their mind up as to whether they would be willing to share or not, and there were some people who very comfortably said “well as we agreed before today, I’m sharing this part of my work but there are other parts of my work that I don’t want to share”. And that was something that was fine.

Time 5:00

So I guess the trick here is to actually build that relationship before you have people in the room. Because I agree with you, if you then say “oh you don’t have to share” there is this kind of, yeah peer pressure and this “oh this is awkward because I’ve been here for 2 hours now and now I’m not willing to share it”. But if you lay out those kinds of expectations in advance then people are usually quite comfortable saying “no, this far but not further”.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Yeah, and that’s a really good point about like sometimes people want partial credit, or like to partially share. We think in terms of binaries of like “no, everything must be anonymous” or it must be….yeah, we opt out. Or everything goes. And I think especially – and maybe Daniel you can speak a bit more to this, like in Creative Methods like we interact with cultures that already exist outside of academia. So I work mainly in podcasting but I’ve participated in Creative Methods around zine making for example, and it was made clear to us by the zine librarian, you know in the culture some people will refuse their zine to be used in academic research. They want the zine to be circulated within community so you can look at it, but you cannot like take pictures of it or even report on its existence basically.

And that, to an academic researcher, might sound like anathema, like I’m not allowed to use this as data, but it’s a very interesting way to look at consent and knowledge dissemination, because you’re like “I created the zine, I want people to see it, I’m not stopping you from seeing it but I’m asking you to then not extract it”.

Nicole Brown: And I think again that’s part of the kind of ethics as a process. So I know that a lot of the times when people are doing research they’re thinking about ethics as this one-stop thing that you do at the beginning of the research in order to be allowed to go into the field and do the research. That’s the institutional protection sort of thing, that’s not what ethics really is about. What ethics truly is about is building that relationship, and in that relationship negotiate every aspect of it.

And like you say, you know there is a copyright or intellectual property right involved here and sometimes people will say “well I want my name attached to that” and other times people will say “I’d rather you didn’t use it at all”. And that’s the prerogative of the person who has contributed to that research.

Ultimately, even if they say I can’t use their canvas for example in an exhibition for a dissemination piece, doesn’t mean I can’t use the data. I can obviously use the information and the data to feed into my analysis to help me develop the recommendations for practice or whatever. So it’s not like this is a waste of time or energy, or waste or work, it’s not, it’s just that, OK this one final thing, that’s the part that you don’t want is because you don’t want to be….I don’t know…exposed or vulnerable as a participant for example. Or you don’t think that your art piece is good enough to be shared in the public. And everybody should have that right really.

Daniel P. Jones: Yeah definitely. I think that’s something that in my own work I’ve been trying to address. So in my PhD research for example, I have done kind of zine workshops, but you know in the PhD thesis I didn’t really refer to the content that had been created that much in the end. It was more so a reflection on that space.

And although in that specific instance it wasn’t because people said “I don’t want this to be talked about”, it was mainly in that situation that decision was made just because it was were peoples’ interests were, they were interested in the workshop more so than the final zine.

And I just think when I talked to people about that, when I said “I’ve done a zine workshop, we’ve created a zine but I’ve not really shared the zine that widely in an academic sense”, people always are very kind of surprised and kind of like “oh well you were funded, you got funding to do a workshop, where’s the final piece?” And there’s a lot of surprise there.

But I think, yeah these conversations around kind of process in Creative Research Methods are happening, but when it comes down it there’s still this expectation of something being produced regardless of, yeah these kind of ethics on a more bespoke or individual scale in terms of those relationships with individual participants and who wants what included in a zine for example. Or even just who is interested in certain elements of work, particularly if we are thinking back to like participatory approaches, right, it’s not even necessarily a “how much can we….?”

It’s not even necessarily a case of “how much work can we give responsibility to participants for”, it’s also a case of “do they actually want to do this?” You know part of that participatory approach is not only kind of allowing people to do as much as they want, but also allowing people to engage as little as they want. And the same goes for….like we were kind of chatting about there in terms of, you know what’s included in kind of dissemination pieces, whether that’s a zine or an exhibition, or a podcast even, right?

Time 10:00

Nicole Brown: Yeah absolutely. Agency means the right to say no to you. So absolutely, that is definitely true.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: I really like Nicole’s emphasis on data generation rather than data collection. When we found the user participatory Creative Methods as generative it encourages us to relate to the work as something dynamic rather than the collection of something static.

Beyond the end product of a workshop, for example a mural, a zine, a poem, the process of creating becomes generative. This means that sometimes having a finished product is less important than the quality of the process itself. But it’s easy to say this and harder to do, because as researchers we’re under pressure to produce recognizable outputs and you can’t easily grasp the process.

Nicole Brown: I think one of the things that you’ve just kind of hit upon here is the challenge of using Creative Methods where there is a certain expectation in Higher Education as to how the use of Creative Methods works and what it looks like and how it’s got to function. And that’s not necessarily the reality of it. And then obviously that means because there are these expectations it then means there is a certain expectation as to what your publication then looks like.

So getting that out, published, you know whether you decide or not decide to try and publish that zine is going to be quite difficult because people won’t necessarily recognise it as an academic article, it’s not equivalent to an academic article. But, not publishing it is also problematic. So it’s almost like they want you to write an academic article and then put this down as supplementary materials. And that’s not proper either because you kind of think “well it’s not just a supplementary material that was produced, this is a thing in its own right”. So that’s the problem that we sometimes get with Creative Methods.

On the other hand though, I mean I’m a great fan obviously of Creative Methods and one of the things that I find really interesting is how certain media are actually levelling the playing field. So a lot of the times I offer Creative Methods and creative opportunities for people, you know again to feed into this idea of the power of expression. And in that art workshop that I talked about earlier I had one station where I had some oyster shells and some Sharpie pens. And the thing is with….I mean I live in the south-east in England, so I live by the coast, I can go and pick oyster shells any time, I’m lucky like that, but the beauty of it is that when you get people to write down something, like on a flip chart or something, there are a lot of people that don’t want to write anything down, especially if they’ve got any kind of disabilities or chronic illnesses because they can’t hold the pen very well. Some people are worried because they may be dyslexic and they’re worried about their spelling. So there is a whole load of embarrassment, guilt, shame that’s involved in getting somebody to write something down on a piece of paper in front of other people.

But with those shells, because they are so wonky and, you know the way that the shapes work, even the people with the most beautiful handwriting were writing in such an ugly fashion and ugly way that everybody felt like “oh I like this, my handwriting doesn’t look any worse than anyone else’s here”. So it’s that kind of thing that it’s interesting to play around with materials where certain things allow you to kind of level the playing field, and again make the research more inclusive through essentially brainstorming, but doing that in a slightly different way with slightly different materials.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And have you found that Creative Methods also suit, in your experience, disabled, chronically ill and neuro-divergent researchers. Inclusive methods is also inclusive other researchers, which of course at work we’re very interested in. And I know why I’m drawn to Creative Methods, but I was wondering in your experience.

Nicole Brown: Yes I agree with that. I think there is something about, you know again the ability to approach data handling perhaps slightly differently as well. So it’s not just….so I do also advocate for creative analysis or embodied analysis, So it’s not just about the data generation phase it’s also about “OK, as researchers let’s tap into our own gut feeling and our own things and let’s have a look as to what the research data tells us and harness that”. So just to say, I still do traditional coding through the software and all the rest of that.

But in addition to that I also advocate very strongly for using creative approaches to analysis as a step towards that. Now sometimes these things are then becoming pieces that you can share, so they move from being an analytical piece to being a dissemination piece quite quickly. Other pieces are never meant to be for sharing, they remain in that private space of me having made sense of my data.

And that’s something that embodied analysis through Creative Methods, that’s something that I have found is particularly helpful for researchers with all sorts of disabilities, chronic illnesses and neuro-divergences, because it helps dive into your personal way of being, it dives into your person way of thinking, and that’s the kind of approach that makes the research a lot more inclusive for the researchers themselves.

Time 15:00

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Can you give an example of a creative analysis?

Nicole Brown: Yeah. Yeah. So one example that I have shared quite a lot is the fibromyalgia chair, which was basically from a project that I did a few years ago now and that was to do with the academic identity and how academics make sense of their experiences under the influence of fibromyalgia.

Now fibromyalgia is quite a contested condition, it’s got chronic pain, chronic fatigue, it’s got depression attached to it, but most importantly for me at the time is that it’s also characterized by cognitive dysfunctions. And I was interested in how can somebody make sense of their academic identity when you’ve got a condition that basically muddles up with your brain, you know, so how can you make sense of that disparate kind of experience there?

And as part of that, my participants were sharing with me in creative approaches but also in conversations how they manage their condition, how they manage their symptoms, what they do to kind of, yeah basically just get through the day. And from that I developed a piece that then became the fibromyalgia chair. And it was exhibited in a gallery, and then actually toured some other gallery spaces as well. And it looks a little bit like I guess a living room space where you’ve got a sofa and then you’ve got all the paraphernalia that people use to help them get through the day. And then you’ve got a TV screen, and on that TV screen in the exhibition I had looped a video simulation of what it feels like to have cognitive dysfunctions and brain fog.

So it’s that kind of piece that then became….you know it wasn’t meant to be a dissemination piece from the beginning, at first it was literally just like me messing around with different objects in my own house. But from that I saw “actually this is something that helps people understand what it’s like to have a chronic condition”. And whilst it came out of my fibromyalgia research, I would suggest that the piece itself actually resonates with a lot of chronic illnesses more broadly. So whilst I still call it the fibro chair, actually I think it’s a broader picture than that.

More recently I’ve also had a piece that was with umbrellas. So that one is quite a unique one as well. So this is a project piece that came out of a research that was dealing with the career progression of disabled academics during the height of the pandemic but also in the aftermath, especially those kinds of academics that have caring responsibilities or that were experiencing life at the intersection with race and gender as well. So it’s that kind of project where people were expressing what it feels like to be working in Higher Education.

And I had this piece of the fragile covers which was basically sort of fairy lights if you like, and from the fairy lights you had tears or raindrops coming down that were highlighting things that people were telling me made life in academia as a researcher very difficult. So for example issues of accessibility, or for example also precarious contracts, the competitiveness, all of those things are impacting them. And the cover under which they would be working is obviously then getting broken because of those heavy raindrops that are hitting those umbrellas. So it was quite exciting to see that installation as well. So yeah.

That’s just two examples of pieces that I have created that were essentially the beginnings of me making sense of the data, but then were developed further to become installation pieces in museums and galleries.

Daniel P. Jones: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s nice to hear from someone who also kind of engages in these like creative ways of analyzing data as well. So for me, I make zine. I’m very visual as a person in how I understand like data, and so if I’ve got thousands and thousands of words of transcripts I will end up trying to kind of create a zine out of just like magazine clippings and things to understand that data myself. And yeah it’s just really nice to….yeah nice to hear that….yeah that there’s other folks out there that kind of engage in that creative analysis as well as…. yeah because it is more than data collection like you said, it’s data generation, it’s analysis, it’s….yeah.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Creative Methods are often seen as more accessible for non-academic audiences and participants but they can be beneficial for researchers as well. They also come with a lot of extra labour because we usually have to use these methods in addition to other more traditional approaches to maintain professional credibility. We need to have a think about how we can collectively change that reality. Have you used Creative Methods in your work? What can you do to make that work more accessible in your workplace?

Thank you Nicole for chatting with us, and thank you for listening to this very first episode of Cripping Reseach Culture. Make sure to subscribe to the show in your podcast app so you don’t miss the rest of the series.

Time 20:00

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was co-hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and Daniel P Jones. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

This Crip Corner is about the term ‘Crip’. ‘Crip’ is a reclaiming of the slur ‘cripple’. It’s similar to how LGBTQIA people have reclaimed ‘queer’. It can be an identity marker, for example “I am disabled and I identify as Crip”, but it can also mean a way of doing things.

We chose to use ‘Cripping’ in the title of this podcast not because we’re only speaking to disabled people but because we are asking questions about research culture from the point of view of disabled staff.

‘To crip’ as a verb means to committing to create a world with disabled people, rather than absorbing disabled people into the world as it is. Cripping changes all of us regardless of ability and we can all take responsibility for that change.

Episode 2: Practical Support for Precarious Researchers with Ash Collins

EDIT: While the Reparative Rest programme that Ash and Élaina mention in this episode is funded by Wellcome, the scheme was created and implemented by the creative collective .

Many marginalised members of staff in higher education, including disabled researchers, are employed on precarious contracts. This makes career progression difficult and often forces the industry to lose important talent. How can universities and funders intervene to make research more accessible and inclusive?

In this episode, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril interviews Ash Collins, the Senior Project Manager - Rec Hurdle, Faculty of Financial & Business Services at the University of Nottingham. We discuss:

• The cost of excluding marginalised researchers for universities
• Concrete examples of how to re-design university processes to make them more accessible
• Concrete examples of how funders can proactively shape the research landscape

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode!

British Sign Language Translation

Transcript

Ash Collins: No-one should have to prove themselves that they’re telling the truth. When I first joined the university I remember being quite thrown by the idea that, you know, your hours of work, it’s based on trust, that’s how it was put to me. No-one’s going to be counting when you clock off for lunch and exactly how many hours you’re working every day but we’ll trust you that it will be the right number of hours and that you’re …. You know, what we will look at is your work output. So for the majority of staff it is based on trust, no-one’s ever checking your timesheet for…. at least in my experience in my roles at the university. But as soon as you bring disability into the equation that trust suddenly goes as to why you are asking for these things. But it’s so interesting how that viewpoint shifts once you mention that you’re disabled in a lot of cases.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we ask the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of. and respect for, disabled staff.

In today’s episode I am talking to Ash Collins from the University of Nottingham about the challenges of balancing a bespoke approach to supporting staff, and a need for sector-wide change. Ash manages REC-HURDLEs, a sibling project to WAARC that is also funded by the Wellcome Trust to study research culture. While WAARC focuses on disabled staff, REC-HURDLEs directly addresses the barriers to career progression that under-represented researchers face in a precarious working environment.

Ash also has experience working as an EDI manager so I wanted to pick her brain about what practical things institutions and funders can do to better support marginalized staff, including disabled researchers. I hope you enjoy this episode, and make sure to listen until the end for the Crip Corner.

So hello and welcome. Ash, would you like to introduce yourself?

Ash Collins: Thanks very much. My name is Ash Collins, I work at the University of Nottingham and I am the senior project manager for the REC-HURDLEs project, looking at employment precarity and professional development for research staff in job families. And I use they/them pronouns.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And today I wanted to have Ash on because it’s kind of with my priority areas, which is cross-cutting themes, and I think Ash’s work very much fits that definition. And because as part of my work I need to think about key performance indicators I really wanted to have a conversation with you about that.

Ash Collins: Yes thanks very much. Yes, so I just want to say before we get started that these are my views and not the views of the university. I don’t anticipate saying anything that the university would necessarily disagree with but just wanted to make that clear for the record.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: It’s not a secret that the Higher Education sector in the UK is currently going through a period of austerity. In times like these EDI can easily become a ‘nice to have’ instead of a ‘must have’ for institutions looking to cut costs. I asked Ash for their advice on how to convince universities that supporting disabled and otherwise marginalized staff was worth the investment, but they turned the question around on me by pointing out that excluding people from research culture also comes with significant costs.

Ash Collins: There’s lots of different ways in which that can cost the university through not supporting these groups. So the obvious would be around reputation and rankings for the university in terms of staff satisfaction, in terms of outputs teaching and research-wise. So first of all students need good role models, they need to be able to see people like them where they’d like to be succeeding in that area that they’re studying.

And quite often we see that student access to adjustments is sometimes easier than staff. So I’ve seen cases where students… the hearing loop to lecture rooms work for students who are hard of hearing but they don’t work effectively for the staff at the front of the room, things like that where we need that parity otherwise those role models won’t be there. And equally, you know the research outputs for the university will suffer if their disabled staff don’t have access to a work environment that suits them.

I for one feel like I’m ten times more productive now I’m working from home all the time with that set-up than I was when I was using most of my energy trying to come into the office. So understanding and listening to staff on the environment that works best for them to do effective and high quality research.

Time 5:06

But in the majority of cases individuals just want to be in a position where they can work effectively in a way that doesn’t, you know, disadvantage them in their life outside of work, they have the energy to be social, or to exercise, or do anything else once they come home from work as well. 

And there’s often an attitude that if you give this to one person more people will take liberties, but in my experience the vast majority of people who are asking for these adjustments are people who desperately need it. To go through the process and self-advocate and ask so much for something, you have to really want and need it, and the fact that someone has to self-advocate to that degree and, you know use all this energy trying to get what they need as a basic for their work also massively disadvantages these groups.

But in terms of research outputs, you know you’ve got things like the REF, particularly with the new people, cultural environments section of the REF, but even just in terms of basic research outputs the university will suffer if their disabled staff aren’t able to contribute to the most of their ability.

And staff retention, we’re losing good quality staff because the environment is untenable. So for example coming back to employment precarity for a moment, there are many staff from a number of under-represented groups, so particularly those who are of lower socio-economic status, or those who are disabled, or carers, or parents where there are additional costs associated with their day to day life, who cannot afford the financial risk towards the end of each employment contract waiting for the next. They don’t have that same safety net that will cover them if that contract isn’t renewed immediately.

So many people from those under-represented groups are leaving academia in search of a career that allows them to have a more permanent contract, even though they love what they do, because they simply cannot afford the financial risk associated. And disabled staff, that’s certainly one of those cases.

But also the issues affecting disabled staff affect other groups too, those from under-represented characteristics. And more widely, you know in terms of needs for work from home support, that doesn’t just speak to disabled staff, that speaks to parents, to people with caring responsibilities, to people who have a long commute, or people who financially can’t afford that commute all the time. And similarly, workplace adjustments, that’s more broad as well.

And also the issue of workload is so pervasive, so systemic in academia, that people are expected to go above and beyond with no overtime pay, and that’s how to get ahead. And because other people are doing it you could say ‘well I’m protecting myself, I’m only going to work my designated hours’ but the reality is there will be someone out there who is more able-bodied, without those additional caring responsibilities or something else, who is able to dedicate their entire life to their work, and they will succeed and get those promotions as a result of that.

And this is a sex-wide issue rather than anything of one institution. But this affects, you know people who are disabled, people who have caring responsibilities, and a bunch of other groups as well, aside from just people who aren’t from an under-represented group but would like to have a life outside of work. So you know, prioritizing these issues improves workplace culture for everybody, improves the well-being of your staff and ultimately the productivity of your staff if you’re not going into burn-out. So I think there’s a number of ways in which this will benefit everybody to support these staff.

And additionally, having a diverse workforce improves life for everybody in the university. Seeing diverse representation in your leadership, in your teaching staff, you know in your management, is really key to bringing others up. And also in educating people who are not from those groups on the realities of life, people with other lived experience to their own. You know you need that representation elsewhere. Without asking disabled staff to advocate on behalf of everyone, just being in their role, being authentically themselves at work, you know will do a huge amount to improving this EDI culture for everybody.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: In his book Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage shows how universities in their organisation and their architecture were built on ableist principles that were supposed to exclude certain kinds of people from pursuing knowledge. As a result, much of the work done to include disabled people involves retrofitting existing systems, and this is long, complicated and much more costly than if the original design were inclusive.

The industry is going through a tough time and many universities have stopped hiring. Maybe this is the moment to stop, take things apart and put them back together again, instead of attempting piecemeal renovations.

Ash Collins: I think right now we’re in a position where in some ways we have an opportunity, because a lot of recruitment practices and other EDI initiatives. It seems very dire they’re coming to a halt because the funding is not there at the moment with the financial situation across institutions, but it does give us an opportunity to really take things apart and put them back together again in a way that we don’t normally have. So I hate the cliché phrase, but you know ‘trying to build the plane in the air’, and right now the plane has landed, we could take it apart, we could put it back together again.

So for example with our work on employment precarity, we’re trying to build a new model of recruitment but it’s really hard when everything’s running to just bring in a new policy and expect that things will change. But right now we have a recruitment freeze because of the financial situation so we can completely re-model things, and when recruitment re-opens we can do it in a new way and we’re not trying to fix things in a process that’s constantly moving.

Time 9:53

And while it’s an awful situation to be in that we don’t have research culture funding in the same way, or EDI funding in a lot of institutions as we did 2 years ago – and I’m not trying to, you know reduce the impact that that’s having because it is enormous – but we are in a position then to really embed those practices as they come back. If we get to a point where financially we are more secure then we can use that as an opportunity to build things that are truly inclusive and accessible from the very start. And I think that is a whole way to look at this as an opportunity, I’m sure you know there’s plenty of downsides to it of course, but seeing the opportunity within that I think is important.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: So how do we start this project? Well, Ash, in their former role as EDI manager decided to hold a mapping activity with stakeholders from across the university.

Ash Collins: So it was a Rapid Improvement event run to look at the reasonable adjustments process for staff and students. So it was a 4 day event – at which point the word ‘rapid’ may become somewhat redundant – but the idea was that it brought together people who had experience of this process from both sides into the same room for 4 days. So we had, you know some of the Executive Board were involved, we had Faculty Operations Directors, the EDI team. We had Disability Liaison Officers, who are staff who do this as a side part to their day to day work. We had disabled staff from the staff network join us. So we had this real breadth of experience of the process.

And the idea was initially we were going to use 2 days to map out the current process for reasonable adjustments at the university, and then 2 days designing what it should be.

Now it very quickly emerged that we were going to need more than 2 days to map what it currently looks like, and in the end we used the 4 days to map the current process as best we could. And then the idea was that was taken forward with a list of action points for HR, for the EDI team, for the Executive Board to take forward and improve the process, which has now been done.

So we saw that even with that wealth of experience in the room, no-one was able to pinpoint exactly what this process was meant to look like when it was working to scratch, you know. So there were huge gaps in ‘where would you access support at this particular part in the process’, or you know it might say on paper that ‘after this step you go to this step’, or ‘if this happens you go here’. But there would be people in the room saying ‘that’s not how it works in that department’ or ‘that’s not the reality of how this actually plays out’.

So I found it really interesting that you could have about 50 people in the room across 4 days and still weren’t able to work out what this process looks like. At which point how is a new member of staff with a disability meant to ever work out where to access support or what this process is supposed to look like, which was why we were doing this event in the first place really.

So we were able to pinpoint where those gaps were, where things needed to be streamlined and come up with a diagram start to finish that people could follow more clearly and at each point they could see what documentation was needed, or who they needed to speak to, and who they could access support from to make it more step by step and more easily accessible to our disabled staff and students.

So by the end of those 4 days the process map before we’d filled those gaps took up the whole length of the room in like quite a large seminar room, and that was just for either staff or students. So it was a horribly amorphous and complicated process. And I imagine that’s the same across many institutions because it’s put together piecemeal, you know you see there’s a gap in there so we add that area of support, or a section of HR thinks they’re who someone comes to for this area but the reality is that people often go somewhere else as a default. So having that experience in the room meant that we were able to pinpoint this.

We had different coloured post-it notes to look at what was working well and what was not working well in the university. There were a lot of red post-it notes by the end of that, so there was a long list of things to change because the reality was it wasn’t working how we’d designed it. But that gave us a clear action plan to take forward.

So we had a 100 day action plan that we built as a team for the Executive Board to take forward and for HR to improve upon. So we’re now in a place where that’s been streamlined and there’s been lots of communication across the university on what the process now looks like.

So yeah it was a very interesting way of going about things. Obviously it showed that it was a lot more complex than we’d thought it was going to be, because I said ‘4 days, 4 days Rapid Improvement event’, but in the end we could have done with 8 or 10.

So yeah I thought it was a really interesting way of doing things. If you can find the time in peoples’ schedules for people across the university to come together, which was the hardest part to be honest, then it was an incredibly effective way of doing things in the end.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: In academia there is a lot of pressure to propose bold and innovative projects to show that you are pushing the envelope and looking to the future. But to do that we also need to make time to take stock. So with working on WAARC I have become increasingly aware of the importance of Crip practicalities, or the pragmatic tasks like looking for existing resources before creating a new one, or populating a spreadsheet with the names and contact details of the people who manage the delivery of Access to Work.

This is the kind of time consuming and sometimes, I’ll admit, tedious work that is necessary to effect change for disabled staff in the long run. At the macro level it is the responsibility of funders to take up their role in shaping research culture.

Ash Collins: Absolutely, I think they have a large amount of power in that area, and not often because they’ve chosen to put themselves in a position of power but just because practically with the finances that they provide that’s where they sit, which means that even if they didn’t choose to have a responsibility for this work they are in some ways accountable for driving this change.

Time 15:07

So there’s a number of ways in which this can be done. So, you know specific kind of targeted funding for disabled researchers would be an obvious one in the same way that this has been done. So for example the Wellcome Accelerator Awards for Black and Pakistani researchers at the moment, you know something similar for disabled research staff would be really key. Additional professional development funds for researchers from disabled backgrounds, similarly to what we are doing with our bespoke scheme but taking the onus off the institution to provide that.

Funding for wider EDI research culture initiative such as the projects that we are both a part of at our respective institutions, because quite often, especially with the financial climate at the moment, universities, however well-meaning, are not in a position to bring out new sources of funding to support EDI or research culture development. But if funders are in a position where they are able to do that – so Wellcome have taken the stance that better research culture means better research that they are funding down the line as well, which is definitely the case. So for funders who have that money available, bringing in research culture in EDI funds would be really key. I think they are in a position to reward positive action at a local level or an institutional level for people they are funding, so whether that’s in terms of application processes or funding reporting processes for research grants.

There’s a lot of people out there who are incredibly well-meaning but their workload means that they can’t carry out this additional EDI work. There are a small number of people who will do it anyway on the side of their desk, even if it’s not part of their workload. There are a small number of people who maybe don’t agree with these EDI initiatives or would not do it regardless; but the vast majority of people in the middle are people who are well-meaning but it’s not their day job, they don’t have time for it, they don’t have that capacity, or they don’t know where to start. And if you make it a part of funding processes then all of a sudden it becomes a more justifiable part of your day to day job and your workload, and that opens up the door for a large number of people who want to do this anyway to be able to prioritise a researcher’s professional development, EDI courses, research culture more broadly, employment precarity, all of these sorts of things.

So rewarding local areas of the university, Schools, for carrying out good work in this area, or institutions as well, similarly to the way that REF do with their sort of assessment - I’ve forgotten the phrasing – the sort of units of assessment, so you know they do that across research groups, Schools, Faculties, institutions. So funders could definitely do something similar there.

And also include making sure that they have good representation in their workforce and on any assessment panels and boards that they have. So for example, funders have begun to put PRiSM staff, so project management staff, on their grant assessment panels because these people have a vast amount of experience in how a project should be run well and what pitfalls there might be. And sort of acknowledging the vast amount of knowledge that’s in PRiSM staff, bringing them on to the assessment panels to look at which projects are likely to succeed, not just from a kind of ‘is the literature sound’ but practically ‘is this going to be viable’, so really acknowledging where they don’t have the experience to make some of these decisions.

And I think the same goes for EDI groups. I strongly believe that we need good representation from all EDI groups on these grant application panels to look at, you know ‘are there ways in which this will have unintended consequences for certain communities?’; ‘has the recruitment of post-docs on to this grant been truly equitable, is it a who you know approach to putting a named researcher on a grant?’; ‘are your recruitment practices truly fair and inclusive for finding your post-docs?’; and ‘are there ways in which the design of this project will disadvantage certain people from being able to work on it or to benefit from the results?’. So I think that’s an important aspect as well.

But there’s definitely a lot of power that these funders have without it necessarily costing them any money, it’s beyond just ‘here’s a funding opportunity for EDI’. It’s about them, you know really institutionalized representation across their funding body and supporting that across other institutions as well.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And finally, in the name of my Crip kin who have fought for independent living, there is another way funders can support under-represented groups, through direct payment.

Ash Collins: I suppose I’d like to speak to something that Wellcome are doing as part of this project, or the wider research culture funding that they’ve got available, which is that they’ve opened up the opportunity for reparative rest leave to staff working on all of their projects.

So this is quite a radical idea that’s been done by one or two other companies previously and it allows you to take additional time off work that doesn’t contribute to your annual leave or sick leave allocation. And there’s a small piece of funding attached to that as well with no expectation for you to prove why you need that leave or that funding, and no expectation to report back on what that funding was spent on.

So it’s for people who are from under-represented groups who might face additional stresses and discrimination in their work; people working in areas that involve a large amount of emotional labour; or people like you and I at the intersection of the two.

And I thought that was a brilliant idea. So we’ve open that up to our participants on the bespoke scheme as well and had some interest there. Obviously there’s no policy for that within the university at the moment. And what we are trying to do with this scheme is quite ground-breaking, so there isn’t a guarantee up front that we’ll be able to make these things work but there is the promise that we will work with line managers and other staff to try and open up these opportunities for individuals where there’s not currently a university policy on it.

Time 20:11

So for example for me, I took that reparative rest and I thought perhaps I’ll use it on a spa day, or I’ll use it on, you know something that I thought would be obvious self-care. And in the end, with the Supreme Court judgement on Trans Rights, I ended up using it for train tickets to go and attend the protests, and that was the best thing for my mental health at that point. But I’d not made any up-front promises on what that money would be spent on and I didn’t have to report back, but it was incredibly useful for me to come out of a bit of an emotional slump.

So yeah I thought that that reparative rest idea was a nice radical approach to care for things for under-represented groups.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you very much to Ash Collins for joining me today, and thank you for listening. Make sure to subscribe to the show in your podcast app so you don’t miss the rest of the series.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Today’s Crip Corner is about the link between disability and precarity. Precarity is a state of persistent insecurity, especially when it comes to employment. For example, early career researchers who depend on short term fixed contracts experience precarious or unstable employment. This means that on top of doing their job they have to put time and effort into securing the next job or risk losing access to food and housing. This becomes extra stressful when you are disabled.

All human beings experience precariousness, that is our lives are fragile and we all depend on certain things to survive, like food, shelter or freedom from harm. We are all at risk if those basic things are taken away from us. Philosopher and disability scholar Eva Feder Kittay argues that living with a disability intensifies the experience of precariousness. Slight shifts and access to care and funds can make it impossible to live, let alone progress in one’s career.

Episode 3: Cripping Recruitment with Jason Olsen

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty: How can we address the barriers disabled people face when applying for a job in higher education? In this episode, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and Armineh Soorenian talk to Jason Olsen, the founder of , disabled people-led company focused on employment policies for disabled researchers. We discuss:

• How HR processes can be made more accessible to disabled people
• The role of HR policies and people in shaping research culture
• The importance of senior management supporting their HR employees

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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British Sign Language Translation

Transcript

Jason Olsen: Yeah, you know it’s interesting because whether you are in the US or the UK you find out that half the re-adjustments usually don’t cost anything, whether it’s dollars or pounds.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we ask the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of. and respect for, disabled staff.

Co-interviewing with me today is Armineh Soorenian, my colleague on work and the research associate in charge of looking into recruitment and working practices that are inclusive to disabled people.

In this episode we talked to Jason Olsen, a disability advocate whose career has taken him from a position as a senior advisor for the US Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy to starting his own company as a policy consultant in the UK. We ask him what inclusive recruitment looks like in his experience and what, for him, is needed to enact cultural change in the workplace.

Before we move on I just wanted to note that there is an issue with Jason’s recording. I did my best to work with a distorted file but I apologise for the less than ideal sound quality. I still think this is a valuable episode and I hope you enjoy it and stay tuned until the very end for the Crip Corner.

Jason, could you introduce yourself to the listeners?

Jason Olsen: Yes. So I’m Jason Olsen. I have been in the EDI field for over 25 years now both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. My PhD is in Public Policy with a focus on Employment Policy, with a super-focus on disabled people’s employment around disability researchers, disability research specialists - we go by DRS - all the research we’ve done is by disabled people who are researchers and who have lived experience of disability.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Are there any specific aspects of the recruitment process that you feel could be improved upon in terms of making it accessible?

Jason Olsen: Well I think it’s what you just said, I think it’s about making it accessible. I think it’s about putting out job postings that are digitally accessible, understandable, fair. For example, if you’re doing a job or you’re supposed to be on the computer all day, you know putting in there that you need to, you know pick up £50 makes absolutely no sense. I think….I really feel that people need to post in a way that is – I want to say non-discriminatory but that’s what I’m getting at, you know. Basically that isn’t doing it in a way to make sure you’re getting the same thing you’ve always got. I think that’s where a lot of companies fail is they… if you don’t appreciate diversity you’re not going to seek diversity. I think once you appreciate it and you see the value it brings, I think you’ll make sure your job postings are put out in a way “we are hiring people that reflect that”.

But it’s kind of a chicken and an egg scenario you know. And I think it’s up to some of us sometimes to push back on some of those job postings and say “you know what, this isn’t legitimate” or “you’re not doing your due diligence”. I actually....and I’ll show you a personal story, I reached out to a disability group for something they had posted, three emails and nothing back. And it was about how much in-person time was required.

So that’s the kind of thing, like even when you’re asked for that before interview, to make sure you’re not….you know. You know how some of these things are, it’s like “write a 5 page proposal” or you know “write this likely thing”. It’s like well let me make sure that I can commit to what you’re asking for before I do all that work. But when you don’t hear back then it gets really discouraging. And it’s OK to say to them, “you know I found this to be a problem in your hiring process, and if I found it to be a problem others might find it to be a problem as well”.

Time 5:19

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: From the way the job advert is written and shared to the post interview forms to fill, the prospective employee must interact with HR systems and policies. And more often than not these systems and policies are not made with disabled people in mind. Before we make changes to the recruitment process to make it more inclusive we need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions, like “What is the role of HR?” Here is Armineh.

Armineh Soorenian: Jason, I was wondering, you mentioned with HR being a barrier what other main barriers do you see in disabled people’s employment experience?

Jason Olsen: So yeah, I mean I think a lot of times this is something employers need to consider, you know when we are talking about HR is “What is the role of HR?” And I’ll tell you why that matters. So one of the big distinctions I’ve seen between the US and the UK is the role that HR plays. So at least some of the people I’ve worked with in the US, HR was really there to ensure that the relationship was maintained between the supervisor and employee.

So for example let’s say I’m a disabled employee and I need an adjustment. I could go to HR and say “I have a disability, this is what I need”. I could disclose to them if I like what that disability is. And they would come back and explain to the manager “this is what the person needs, it’s justified, so we need to make sure we provide it”.

What that does – now I’ll get back to saying that’s if you have a good HR person who is trained in disability and everything else, we can come back to that - but what that does is, it helps preserve the relationship and ensure that that person can continue to get work experience where they are.

The issue you run into a lot of the times is, you’ll see someone ask their manager or their direct supervisor for an adjustment and a lot of times what the supervisor will say is “I don’t understand why you need that, I’m not going to give it to you” de-de-de-de…. And then the only recourse for the disabled person is to challenge that supervisor directly, and sometimes that involves challenging, you know taking that issue to your supervisor’s boss or your supervisor’s supervisor, which can then really sour the relationship between the disabled person and the person they work for.

So that almost sets the person up for failure because it’s really hard to get someone who you’ve gone over the head of to then say “you know what, I’m going to put your first for training”, “I’m going to be your mentor”, “I’m going to help you learn the ropes of this new job” when one of their first experiences with you, or one of the experiences they happen to have with you when you require a disability or have a flare-up or have something happen, is that challenging aspect, where essentially what you’re doing is you’re making their job harder.

One of the things that employers could do is start tapping some of the pools they don’t typically go around to find new employees. For example one of the things we used to do in the agency I worked at is we would go to HBUs. You know almost every university has a disability office, we would send stuff out, you know we would work to make sure we were sending stuff out to them about job opportunities, internships, summer programmes, everything else to, you know really attack it at all levels. You know we start getting disabled folks in the door at a young age to get some of that work experience Armineh was talking about, as well as to start really grooming them for service and to be full-time employees and what that takes. And, you know sometimes even getting them into mentoring programmes where they could talk to other disabled folks about what’s worked and what hasn’t worked; how to approach an employer; how to grow soft skills, you know a lot of things a lot of us aren’t taught if you’re disabled and young that everyone else is taught. So those kind of things I think would help.

Time 10:00

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Still, we have to be careful not to create an ‘us versus them’ dynamic between disabled employees and HR employees, after all they can be one and the same. And many people in HR on a case by case basis take personal risks to support disabled staff. Individuals may want to participate in systemic and cultural change but it can be very daunting when your job is to uphold existing and sometimes harmful policies.

There are a lot of people working in HR who would like to make a change, and there are also disabled people working in HR, and so if we acknowledge that changing the culture passes through, kind of changing the role of HR, do you have any examples or any ideas of what that might look like?

Jason Olsen: Yes, so I mean I will back you up on that. I think when you run into the challenge of the culture though is when for example you have that disabled person who understands adjustments; or when you have the person who is not disabled who understands adjustments and wants to ensure that the disabled person is given those adjustments, that the culture isn’t negative about that within the company. Do you know what I’m saying? Like that person should not be the outlier. And a lot of times what I’ve found when I go in and I talk to businesses and stuff, and I talk to some of the folks who work in HR, that person is there, but a lot of times that person feels like they’re having to take risks to provide what the disabled person has asked for.

And that’s what I’m talking about the cultural change. That’s the kind of person who should be leading the initiative in HR for adjustments, not the person who feels like they’re sticking their neck out to make sure that they’re providing what’s been asked for. And a lot of times they’re legally required to provide, you know. And that’s the kind of culture shift I’m talking about.

I have seen, and I’ll give you two things that I’ve seen that I think work really well that I have not seen used as widely here. One of them is, there were some agencies I used to work with and work at when I worked in the US Government and they had what was called a Disability Program Manager. And they were really inspiring. And sometimes this would be tied to other groups who had protected characteristics, or who would also deal with issues of inter-sectionality within the workforce. But really that was their job, was to make sure not just that people were getting the adjustments; making sure the adjustments were put in place; making sure that they were following up; that they continued to be effective and nothing else was needed. And I think that’s something that would be really applicable to some of the larger employers here. Granted it might be harder for some of the SMEs to do that. But I think that really encourages the inclusion of people, especially when you have that kind of knowledge in-house to deal with that.

The other thing that I’ve seen that is not used very much here in the UK, and I am telling it everywhere I go, is the interactive process. The interactive process is not something I’ve seen really done much here. And that interactive process is, when HR receives something or a supervisor receives something, it’s really about the relationship where the disabled person and the provider of the adjustment are working together interactively to make sure they are being provided with what’s needed, and also what will make them a very productive worker.

So many times one of the things I’ve seen used here is an assignment based approach, where someone will ask for an adjustment. And without even contacting the person they will assign that person an adjustment, or say “we don’t think that’s what you need, this is what we think you need”, and simply just assign it and say “that’s what you’re getting”. And the problem with that is, what they are giving without talking to the disabled person could be completely ineffective.

So those are the two things I think that would really make a difference, having someone with that specialist knowledge – and sometimes I’ve seen that person sit outside HR, which I think has been a bit helpful. But this is also the kind of person, like I said, who could get information and not share you know all the intricacies of the disability with the supervisor. So I would say that and the interactive process would be I think some game changers for employers and for the disabled people they’re hiring.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: It all comes back to the need for stakeholders at all levels of the hiring process to take action. The disabled employee should not have to bear all of the responsibility to obtain the access necessary to do their job, but neither should all major support rest in the hands of an individual HR staff member with limited power. This leads me to my last question for Jason.

“In your experience what are some of the most impactful changes you’ve seen employers make to improve disability inclusion in the recruitment?”

Jason Olsen: A lot of it that I’ve seen will start at the top, as far as ensuring that there’s leadership there. I think a lot of the times we hear that said and we hear “make sure you have good leadership”, “make sure there’s good culture” and I think that said a lot. But then no-one dives into what that means. I think a lot of the research says “OK well we’ve found this. You know if you have supportive leadership and you have good quality culture when it comes to disability, then you know you’re going to do better”. Well what does that mean, you know? And that’s usually where I think businesses tend to stumble.

One of the things I found a lot, and it’s not just private industry, I’ve seen this is public industry too, where when you have strong leadership who comes in and is willing to hear what the issues are and then to also address the issues, that’s what you need. I think anyone who has done this research for a long time has probably been frustrated, because you sign up to do research for a company who says “we want you to help us identify issues, we want a DEI plan and how we’re going to improve things”. And you do all the research and you find out what the biggest barriers are and you turn it in and you work with them on it. And then you see what they publish for the DEI plan. And usually the biggest problems have been left out of whatever they’re publishing. And that would be both, I would say, private and public reports.

I think that does a real dis-service not just to the researcher who has done it but to themselves as employers. Because basically what they’re saying is, “you’ve done all this research, you’ve highlighted what the big problems are, but we’re not going to address those”.

And I think when you have real leadership, they say “No, we are going to address those. We’re going to highlight these are problems, we’re going to address these problems. Not only are we going to address these problems, we’re going to come back after we’ve tried to address these problems and see if what we’ve done to try to address the problems is working, and if it’s not working we’re going to have another evaluation about why it’s not working.” So I think when it comes to leadership that’s what needs to change within the environments.

I’ll just tag on to that a little bit too about the cultural change, because they’re always talking about cultural change and I don’t think we get deep enough into that a lot of the times in the research we see. And one of the things I think anyone who has been disabled for a long time begins to understand is the mantra, “human resources is not there for you, human resources is there for the employer”.

And that’s where the cultural change I think a lot of the times needs to start, right, because a lot of the times people who are new employment, or disabled people who are told “HR is the one to give you this reasonable adjustment”, or “to understand what you’re going through”, they can really be the gatekeepers to that person maintaining employment.

Now unfortunately our caveat is by saying, too many times in my experience what I’ve seen is that HR has taken on the role as almost the “got ya” police. Like they feel it’s their job to try to catch people out who are faking, right. They think, they tend to assume that is their main mission from now on. And I don’t care if it’s disability or any other kinds of adjustments or change to the workplace, it almost seems like they become the barrier to inclusion. And that’s really where when we start talking about cultural change I would argue that’s one of the biggest places it needs to happen.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you very much Jason for joining us today, and thank you all for listening. Make sure to subscribe to the show in your podcast app so you don’t miss the rest of the series.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, featuring Armineh Soorenian. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

This Crip Corner is about inclusion versus access. Inclusion and access are often used interchangeably but they are not the same. People relate to inclusion and access very differently depending on the context. In a practical way we may feel included, but being able to access a room, a meeting or a financial status may seem more concrete. As part of our work research we heard from some disabled staff for whom access seemed like the bare minimum. They believed we should aim for inclusion as that reflects a broader cultural change. For others, the priority was receiving access in the form of adjustments, but they viewed attempts at inclusion in the workplace with skepticism. Some disabled people don’t want to be included if it means that they have to assimilate and play respectability politics. One thing was clear, while mainstream EDI polici3s usually treat inclusion and access as obvious goods we should all want, disabled people hold diverse and nuanced views.

Episode 4: Disabled-led Research with Bethan Evans et al

Disabled researchers are here now. Bethan Evans, Anna Ruddock, Alison Allam, and Morag Rose have developed inclusive methods for researchers and participants with energy limiting conditions and illnesses, showcasing what research led by disabled scholars can look like. In this episode, we discuss:

• The management labour needed to create a disability-inclusive workplace
• Access intimacy
• How disabled-led research informs collaborative and co-production relationships

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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British Sign Language Translation

Transcript

Anna Ruddock: You know the joy of how we work is that for probably the first time ever because of the nature of the group, we don’t have adjustments because we are adjusted by definition. And actually what has to happen is that the academic institution, the academic world and the wider world in some ways, has to adjust to us in this case. And there’s something subversive and very pleasurable in that, which I enjoy very much.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we asked the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of, and respect for, disabled staff.

In today’s episode we’re exploring how disabled researchers can re-make or crip the research process to fit their access needs. To do this I spoke to four researchers that worked on projects focusing on the experiences of people living with energy limiting illnesses and energy limiting conditions like MECFS, Long Covid, or fibromyalgia. The voice you heard at the top of the episode belongs to the independent researcher Anna Ruddock. I approached Anna and her team to discuss inclusive research collaboration, the area of work that is led by my colleague Sophie Phillips.

Collaborative research tries to tackle the “us versus them” or “insider versus outsider” approaches between academic scholars and community members. In the case of the Challenging Disbelief and Disregard Project everyone involved lives with an energy limiting condition, or ELC, and I wanted to know how that impacted their research environment.

I hope you will enjoy this episode and rate and review it on Apple Podcast. This helps other listeners find the show. Make sure to listen until the end for the Crip Corner.

Welcome everyone and thank you for coming. Would you like to start by introducing yourselves? We could start with Bethan.

Bethan Evans: Hi. Thanks for having us on the podcast today. So I’m Bethan Evans, I’m a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Liverpool and I came to the work that we are talking about today through awareness of chronic illness inclusions work. And I am also the co-director of the Centre for Health, Art, Society and Environment at Liverpool and as part of our Seminar Series we invited Catherine Hale and Anna Ruddock who is here today, to talk to us. And following from that through other conversations we then developed a series of projects collaboratively that have looked into various aspects of energy limiting conditions, and I myself have an energy limiting condition as well. So I will pass on to Anna who is next on the screen.

Anna Ruddock: Yeah, again thanks for having us. My name is Anna Ruddock, I am a….. I work freelance, so I run a small consultancy called Equitable Health Futures where I focus on research and strategy and communications, all focused on health and disability justice. I am trained as an anthropologist, but I’m sure as we will get into full time academia was not a hospitable space for me so I have kind of one foot in different camps so to speak. And as Bethan said, I came to this collaboration initially through my role as a founding member of Chronic Illness Inclusion. Shall I pass on to Alison?

Alison Allen: Thank you. Hi everyone. My name’s Alison Allen, I’ve got a background in Disability Studies and Social Policy. Again, I came to this work through Chronic Illness Inclusion and working with Catherine here, which I think is going to be the golden thread throughout all of this and our introductions. So I started doing some work with Bethan and the others and over the last couple of years as you know currently working around Higher Education and the experiences of being disabled and working within such an environment. Thank you. I’ll pass you over to Morag.

Time 5:00

Morag Rose: Thanks very much for having me. My name is Morag Rose and I am a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool, so I work quite closely with Bethan who invited me to join the project. My general research interests are about spatial equality and justice, and I am particularly interested in disability and its intersections. And kind of parallel to my academic career I also work as a walking and performance artist, so I kind of crossed over different elements of the project.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Traditional research studies on things. In the Social Sciences and the Humanities this means studying on people, on communities, on service users to try and understand human behaviour or the impact on the social policy for example. But unlike in physics where an electron doesn’t have political opinions to share, human beings have things to say and many people prefer to be involved and consulted in research about their own experiences and about the issues that most matter to them.

So, collaborative research has become an important part of academia in an attempt to better balance out the power between scholars and participants, yet it’s not always clear how we can do that. Here is Anna again.

Anna Ruddock: I did some work recently for Wellcome Trust about co-production and co-creation and trying to generate some more guidance for researchers. Because we find ourselves in this moment where there is a real push for co many things, collaboration; co-production; co-design; co-creation, and actually very little guidance around how we do it and very little support from institutions, be they academic institutions or funders to put in the additional time and resource that is required to do that kind of co-production work authentically. And as part of that project I worked with colleagues to do a literature review, and it was very striking to me how still, despite the fact that there is a lot more co-production happening, there is still a real sense of othering in the literature.

So you know, the people you are co doing things with are still, on the whole, this group that you with your academic institutional power have put together and brought into the project, with the best possible intentions in many cases. The difference with the way we have worked is that it hasn’t been that there is a group of well-meaning well-intentioned non-disabled academics at the heart who have created a lived experience group or an advisory board who then bring in that lived experience, it’s…..this is all driven from first principles because we are those people, we do come with different relations to the academy and there are power differentials, as there are in any collaboration. But the fact that we all bring similar experience of a particular way of being in the world to our ways of working is what, for me, has been so striking and so different about this project and so refreshing honestly.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Disability Justice is a community based framework developed in the USA by Sins Invalid, a collective of disabled black and brown queer and trans artists of colour. It has ten major principles and one of these is leadership of the most effective. In the case we are discussing today people with ELCs are the best placed to understand how to make research culture more inclusive of people like them because they know intimately all of the systems we must engage with to do our jobs. The people most affected by barriers also have insight on what practical solidarity looks like when tackling those barriers. I asked Morag what this meant to her.

Time 9:35

Morag Rose: Well I think with this it is involving everyone as often as possible and as genuinely as possible. So when we ask a question about ‘what do you think?’ there is a multitude of answers, it’s not going ‘we’re running a consultation here can you tick one of these three boxes, neither of which are quite like you’. And I do think it’s about simple things like – well actually not so simple things – but helping people navigate the labyrinth of university bureaucracies to make sure they get paid, and advocating in those very practical ways, and just respecting what it might mean to make people feel included.

So for example, something that I learned and probably hadn’t considered well enough before was the importance of the asynchronous research methods, so people have multiple ways of taking part. And I realised that I’m not always very good at building in enough breaks, even when I think I am. So, you know there’s something about pace as well that is very practical and shouldn’t be radical and shouldn’t be difficult, but sometimes in the climate of academia we are, you know supposed to be rushing. And I say that as an early career person, I’ve sometimes felt the very big conflict between the value and philosophical and theoretical importance of slow scholarship, but actually people telling me ‘you won’t get a job unless you’ve done 8 million good things before breakfast’ you know?

So I think it’s practical solidarity amongst the research team, but also towards all our co-producers and collaborators and the audience as well.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And Alison added:

Alison Allen: I like the idea of practical solidarity because I feel like I’ve felt it. I feel like I’ve found a role in academia that really just wouldn’t have existed for me because I don’t have the energy or the spoons to consistency work even one day a week. So you know, sort of working in hours and, you know getting X amount of hours over quite a long period of time that, you know I can use. And you know obviously there are deadlines that we have to meet, but they’re quite flexible, and Beth is obviously flexible and there’s a sense that I can do it in my own time, and that makes it manageable for me.

And then that impacts both on my work identity but, as Morag alluded to, my wider identity and my wider sense of self, because I just feel like I’ve lost those feelings of shame and I’ve lost those feelings of self-doubt, and I’ve lost those feelings of sort of feeling like I have to hide or even make up excuses because I can’t tell them yet again ‘I’m too tired to attend this meeting’. And it’s that constant, you know sort of ticking away at your sense of self and feeling like you are failing and all the rest of it. And I think working in this way has really stopped that for me. So it’s had a bigger impact on me just beyond being able to work a pretty limited amount of hours per week or per year, but you know, a wider sense of self has been generated in a positive way.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: When running a project there is a lot of groundwork the primary investigator or team leader needs to do to encourage inclusive practices. For example, as Bethan explains, if we assume the research team as well as the participants will need flexible time in order to work, the project and its deliverables must be designed accordingly.

Bethan Evans: There definitely is a misfit between the way we are working and academic structures, particularly like you say around time. And that’s been variable. So the first project that we worked on together was funded by a British Academy small grant which can run up to two years. So we took two years for that project and very much explained within the grant application that while the work doesn’t look like it would take two years, that’s because we’re all working on Crip Time.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hi. I just wanted to do a little interlude here to explain what Crip Time means. Crip Time is a way of talking about how living with a chronic illness or disability changes our relationship to time, and by extension to productivity in the work. For example, as someone with MECSF myself I have to carefully plan out time to recover from writing and reporting the script so that I can host an event tomorrow. Between waking up and making my coffee I have to make a dozen calculations on how to spend my energy so that I can make it through the day. This kind of constant puzzle solving and priority sorting is one of the ways in which I live in Crip Time, but there are many others. I will leave a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about it. Now, back to Bethan.

Time 14:30

Bethan Evans: So that project gave us that flexibility to a certain extent. The two other projects we’ve worked on, one funded by AHRC and one funded by ISRF have both been stricter time limits but we’ve been able to ask for no cost extensions to both of those awards which has allowed us to spread the time a bit further. There is a limitation there as well that they are no cost extensions, so they don’t allow for extra paid time for people on the grant. So while we have been able to factor extra time in there, there definitely is an institutional barrier there. And negotiating and navigating with university finance for setting up contracts that are hours per week rather than days per week, it’s difficult, it’s something they’re not used to. Trying to get asynchronous methods through Ethics applications, we did that but I’m increasingly getting pushback now from Ethics as I have kind of research students trying to put through similar methods.

So there’s definitely a kind of…. definitely an institutional landscape that isn’t very accessible and open to these things, and I’m continuously brought back to Sara Ahmed’s work about institutional walls and the need to hit up against them so many times. And I definitely feel a lot like someone hitting up against brick walls quite a lot, though I’m also stubborn and will keep hitting up against those walls until there is some movement, you know.

But like I said, that’s because I’m supported by the rest of the team as well in other areas of the project that allows me to do that. I think if I was trying to do these projects and make that change on my own, that would probably be impossible I think.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Tackling the ableist and disabling structures of academic work through thoughtful and thorough project management is only one aspect of an inclusive, collaborative research project. Often creative methods are introduced in collaborative research because we assume they are more accessible and less hierarchical than other data collection methods. But this is not automatically true. As we have discussed in the episode with Nicole Brown, co-production can become extractive and disrespectful if we operate as if we are collecting data from participants, ultimately taking knowledge from them. Here, Bethan and Morag expand on Nicole’s point on co-production as data generation.

Bethan Evans: Yeah, so I think we thought very carefully about how to use the creative methods and ensure that they were inclusive, that people had opportunities to have their contributions recognised. The way we worked – so this was for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and we worked with five artists who ran both….each artist ran both synchronous online and asynchronous online workshops for people with energy limiting conditions. And each artist brought different skills and ran different types of workshops.

So there were some that were Zeen-making; some that were creative writing; some that were mixed medium; one that resulted in an audio collage/podcast. I mean we kind of tried to ensure that if those participants wanted their contributions recognised that they could do. So we did manage to get Ethics approval to allow people to be named if they asked to be named as the producers of the artwork that they produced.

And all of the artists that we worked with have experience of chronic illness disability or caring and so everyone kind of was coming from a similar position I think, rather than again this….along with all the researchers. So rather than again this kind of extractive, we were starting from a point of connection I think. And I hope that people took that from the project, and we did have some good feedback from the project.

Morag Rose: I just wanted to echo what you said, and I think that coming from people with lived experience and also experience as artists who work in a very open and non-extractive way, I think it is so baked into the project. And I don’t think just having lived experience or just being an artist makes you necessarily non-extractive.

I actually genuinely think a lot of this credit goes to Bethan as the instigator and as the person who sets the tone. Because I think that often the thing that makes a project is having somebody at the figured head who is completely committed to those ideas as well and can kind of champion them and have a lot of insight, but also be open to everyone’s contribution and learning.

And again, I fully recognise the labour in creating that is pretty extreme, but I think being of and working with, just kind of bakes it in from the beginning really. And I don’t remember any time in the project where I kind of spied these senses were ringing that somebody didn’t get it. Because again I think it’s something about….it shouldn’t be extraordinary, and it isn’t in lots of ways but unfortunately within the kind of academic context it can be, and it shouldn’t be.

Time 20:35

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And I’ll leave the final word with Alison.

Alison Allen: I just think for me the Creative Methods was around inclusion and just allowing people the space. Particularly with energy limiting conditions you can often experience brain fog and you can struggle with your words, and I think allowing that space, so that created space to not just rely on words which we do tend to as qualitative researchers, that’s what we’re about is words, and for me it just allowed people and indeed ourselves to just think beyond words and not be limited by words. And particularly, as I say, if you have brain fog and words are difficult there was that space, and I think that’s what worked well.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you to Anna, Alison, Bethan and Morag for such a rich discussion. I also want to acknowledge another member of the research team, Ana Bê Pereira, who was also involved in both projects but could not be with us today. The second project included Aaliyah Shaikh and Stephanie Davis as researchers and Khizra Ahmed, Khairani Barokka, Julian Gray, Mish Green and Louise Kenward as artists. And you listener, what are your experiences of collaborative research? You can message them to me on LinkedIn through the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture profile. I will leave a link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, as this helps new listeners find the show.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Today’s Crip Corner is about access intimacy. Disability activist Mia Mingus defines access intimacy as “that elusive hard to describe feeling when someone else gets your access needs”. In this episode we’ve heard from Bethan, Morag, Alison and Anna about the difference it made for them to be a part of an all-disabled research team. It meant that they all started with a shared vocabulary if you will about what it means to live with an energy limiting condition and they were able to work with that to write their own rules about how to run a research project.

In the workplace access intimacy happens when processes and ways of working are built around existing needs, instead of reacting in the form of adjustments. Once we are free from being disbelieved and disregarded, the real work can begin to make research performed within large institutions and beholding to external funders as inclusive as possible. In this way access intimacy is not the goal, it is the beginning.

Episode 5: Universal Design for the Workplace with Stuart Moore

Sometimes, we already have the concepts and the frameworks to achieve more disability inclusion. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel, we need to tackle structural change with the tools we have. In this episode, Élaina speaks to Stuart Moore, a co-director of the National Association for Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN) and an EDI lead for NHS England. Topics covered:

• Applying Universal Design in the workplace
• Leveraging leadership to affect policy
• The importance of listening to disabled people about AI

Message about the podcast:

British Sign Language Translation

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you can find podcasts.

Transcript

Stuart Moore: If they want to get disabled people into employment, what is the Government going to do to hold employers to account for the work they do to build trends of disability, inclusion and accessibility to careers?

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we asked the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of, and respect for, disabled staff.

In this episode I talked to Stuart Moore. Stuart is a co-director of NADSN, the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks, a partner organisation to the project I work on, WAARC. Stuart has 20 years of experience working in equality, diversity and inclusion, including for the British Civil Service and the NHS. Together we discuss the importance of establishing universal design in the workplace and learning to leverage leadership positions to change policies.

Finally, we address the importance of holding the Government accountable when it comes to reforms that affect disabled people’s ability to access careers.

I hope you find this discussion interesting and make sure you stay until the end for the Crip Corner.

Stuart Moore: I’m Stuart Moore, I am a director of the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks. And the last 12 years I have worked for the National Health Service primarily in equality, diversity and inclusion roles. So I was the EDI Lead at Health Education England; I was the Regional Head for Equality of the South-East; and also I was the Lead of the NHS Workforce Disability Equality Standards, which is mandated to all NHS Trusts in England.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: What, in your experience, are some of the most effective ways of implementing EDI policies?

Stuart Moore: So some of the most effective strategies I’ve seen have been those ones where there’s a clear vision as to why that organisation is looking to do its work around EDI; what are the drivers for them in terms of this work. It’s also clarity about how they will engage, involve disabled people, staff with different protected characteristics in their strategies. And also being clear about how they can use evidence, data, to inform and develop the actions set out in the strategy.

But thinking back to when I was in the Cabinet Office, that was actually the first time I had been involved in a Disabled Staff Network. So I was invited to Chair that Network. And so I was quite fortunate that the organisation doing this work around this first EDI strategy really recognised the need to involve and to listen to diversity of voices, diversity of experience. So the Network I had was very much tapped into that Civil Service strategy.

If I think about some of the changes I’ve seen, I think there’s been some positive developments in respect to greater societal understanding of conditions such as mental health and neuro-divergence, and I think more people have been able to pick up and share their lived experiences with those conditions.

Time 5:00

But at the same time it’s clear to me there are many people who do not feel comfortable to share information about a disability or long term condition. So I think there’s more to do to build up an understanding about the diversity within disability. And that when we talk about disability we obviously mean physical conditions but we also mean hidden conditions, sensory and communication impairments, mental health and neuro-divergence. So I think for employers who want to really do work that has an impact around EDI they really need to understand that diversity.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And once we raise awareness and employers listen to disabled people, how can they translate that into a practical action plan?

Stuart Moore: One of the questions would be “How can employers take a more inclusive design approach to their workplace policies so that people don’t have to do these additional administration things to go about their lives?” So they can say “oh yes, I need this time off because I’ve got a disability”. It’s just accepting. Because… so you have inclusive design is something which is not really well understood as it should be. I think there’s more benefits in building that knowledge about universal design.

I mean I used to work at an organisation called the Equality Challenge Unit. And the Equality Challenge Unit was the equality body for the higher education sector. And so I was sort of national policy advisor looking at disability, and I advised universities so that they could support disabled staff and disabled students in the sector.

But I also had the opportunity to develop some national guidance policies and publications for the sector including some around inclusive building design. So if you are someone involved in managing campuses, facilities, or building new buildings, whether you really think about that inclusive design approach. So the guidance publication I was involved in and to build greater understanding of that inclusive design approach.

So yeah I think inclusive design, universal design, I think it’s been around for a while but I think it still needs really for people to understand how they can implement that in their work.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Universal design or inclusive design is a term we can trace back to 1997 when a group of architects, product designers, engineers and environment design researchers at the North Carolina State University developed a framework to ensure everyone using a physical space had equal access and use of it. A common example is making sure every school and library is wheelchair accessible.

But in the last 30 years universal design has also been used to tailor non-physical spaces like learning environments. Teachers are encouraged to think of different types of learners when they design their course materials, assignments and delivery methods because it’s easier to start from a place of equal access than to try and add on adjustments later.

Time 9:50

Although inclusive design is a well-known concept by now it’s not often applied to the workplace. Beyond asking for an ergonomic desk chair there are ways to establish cultural patterns, for example around flexible working schedules, remote and hybrid practices, air quality, and quiet office spaces that benefit everyone, not only disabled staff members.

Another reason to adopt inclusive design is that it lays down a foundation and an infrastructure for how workplaces react to dynamic changes. For example, as companies accelerate their adoption of algorithm based technologies or AI there is a risk that workplaces that already exclude disabled people will continue to leave disabled people out of important conversations regarding AI use.

Stuart Moore: One of my particular interests at the moment is artificial intelligence and digital technology. We have seen such…. we have seen AI and technology being introduced at such a pace I do have concern that the voices of disabled people have not been listened to in the creation of this AI and digital technology, and it could – and it does – lead to biases. And if there’s going to be equality of rights of AI and tech in workplaces, how accessible is it going to be for disabled people to use? So I guess there’s some need for some sort of measurement about instruction for AI and tech, but also how accessible it is for disabled people to actually use. I think it’s good to have AI technology but we can’t afford it to create new barriers for disabled people in employment.

So yeah I think there is a move to greater reliance on digital technology within the NHS in terms of patient care. There’s also talk by I think everyone about greater use of AI in the Civil Service, which, yeah OK we are in a place and time where we have these things so why not use them? But it cannot be at the expense of the impact and the rights of disabled people.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: There are not many disabled people in leadership positions currently. How can we communicate the importance of making concrete disability inclusion policy changes to those with decision-making power?

Stuart Moore: If you want to influence senior leaders you need to understand something about why they are there, or what is the work that they do, what role do they play in that organisation. So if you can understand that, you can perhaps nuance the language in a way which is something they can understand.

So for example, if you are trying to get engagement with a finance director, the sort of language you would want to use are ones from an economic financial perspective. If we could give disabled people support, what are the financial benefits? And so for example, if we support disabled people for their assessments, it means we have a greater likelihood of retaining their talent which means less wastage on the money we’ve invested to train and to educate that person to become, for example perhaps a doctor, a nurse, a midwife. So for me it’s always about trying to understand what it is that they are trying to do in their work and adjusting the language in a way which does get their engagement, their interest, it’s something they can answer.

People talk about “oh yes we’re champions” but they don’t always understand the way we talk about things from the disability community. So it’s important that we do sort of subtly change our approach depending on the roles of those senior leaders.

Time 15:00

And it’s similar with the Government, we’ve got a Minister for Disabled People. If you were to ask that person, Stephen Timms, how well he understands the social model of disability, he might say “OK well I’ve heard of it but I don’t really understand it”. So, I mean there are well-intentioned people up there but they don’t always get the… they don’t really have the knowledge that we have from our lived experience. So we do have to think about how we translate our language into a way which does become something they can understand and that they can support.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And speaking of the Minister for Disabled People, the UK Government is proposing some important reforms to disability benefits, like Access to Work and the Personal Independence Payment that would drastically cut the amount of people who are eligible to receive and would restrict eligibility criteria in general.

You have made an important point about ensuring that disabled people have access to careers, not just jobs. What do you think we should demand of the Government?

Stuart Moore: Oh God, given the Government, obviously while thinking about the reforms they’ve been talking about in terms of trying to get more disabled people into employment. I think that is….just saying again what I said about employers, yes it’s all good intention but as we know there are many organisations where disabled people experience more harassment, more discrimination, they don’t always have the opportunities to progress their careers. So I support the Government’s intentions in terms of mandating disability pay gap reporting, so that’s good to get the numbers, but they should go beyond that to also make it mandatory that employers must create action plans, and must also produce a narrative saying, “this is the data, but from this we have developed these action plans, we know that staff experience this situation or that situation”. So I mean the data with the action plans was a narrative, it really creates that bounded view of how well employers are doing in terms of building disability inclusion.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And that’s a wrap for today’s episode. Thank you to Stuart Moore for talking to me and to NADSN for partnering with me on WAARC.

And you dear listener, have you had an experience with inclusive design in the workplace? You can let me know by messaging me on LinkedIn through the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture profile. I will leave a link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, this helps new listeners find the show.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Today’s Crip Corner is on the social model of disability. This is the definition that the Secretary of the Department of Work and Pensions used in 2021 to present the National Disability Strategy to Parliament. “The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control”.

The medical model sees disabled people as being defective, as lacking something to make us normal. The social model on the other hand recognises that it is our environments that create barriers for people with a wide range of impairments and differences to participate in society. The social model situates disability at a structural and not an individual level.

Episode 6: Making Innovative Collaborations with Alison Buxton feat. Emily Ennis

In this episode, Élaina interviews Alison Buxton, a Senior Fellow and Innovation at the ����TV about collaborative impact-forward research.

After the credits, instead of a Crip Corner, we get a short talk with Emily Ennis, the Research Culture Manager at the University of Leeds and new co-host of the podcast.

Topics covered:

• Taking time to build mutually beneficial relationships before doing research
• The importance of having a diverse team with different neurotypes

Message about the podcast:

British Sign Language Translation

Listen to the episode through this or wherever you can find podcasts.

Transcript

Alison Buxton: There are two questions that I find myself asking over and over and over again. The first one is, what are we actually trying to do? Not what do we think we should be doing but what are we really trying to do? What is the actual problem, not what we think the problem is? And that’s a tough question to get to the bottom of, but I find myself asking it over and over again. Because once you can understand what you’re actually trying to do then you can start building a solution to that. And it might be… and this is where the innovation comes in, quite a lot of the time people think they know what they should be doing but that’s not actually fixing the problem, it’s just doing what you think you should be doing. So what are we actually trying to do is a really big question that I ask over and over again.

And the second question that I find my asking is, what if? Like what if we did it this way? Like what’s the worst that would happen? Or, what if? Like have that possibility thinking, be brave. But ask that question with lots of people in the room because you need to hear the responses from lots of people. So you need to ask the questions but you also need to have your big ears open in order to listen, because people come at the world from very different angles and put those things together and you can do some really awesome things.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we asked the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of, and respect for, disabled staff.

Today we have a special episode. First, I speak to ����TV’s very own Alison Buxton. Alison is a Senior Fellow in Innovation for the School of Education; and the Director of Maker{Futures}, a mobile Maker Space for schools, libraries and museums, focusing on hands-on learning. We talk about the importance of building trust in the collaboration process and discuss how higher education can learn from impactful projects in other industries.

Then, instead of a Crip Corner I will be joined by friend of the pod Emily Ennis, the Research Culture Manager at the University of Leeds. Emily is the newest host of the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, and I have them on to introduce the podcast to you.

Now, without further ado here’s my interview with Alison Buxton.

Alison Buxton: I’m Alison Buxton. I am a Senior Innovation Fellow in the School of Education at the ����TV and I lead on a programme called Maker{Futures} as well.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: What does an Innovation Fellow look like in education?

Alison Buxton: Me! Well really I think we’re still kind of trying to work that out. Innovation generally is something that you tend to hear about and see more in other schools and faculties, so particularly Engineering. It’s a very new thing in Faculty of Social Sciences, we’re still working out what that looks like. But in terms of what I do and why I’m a Senior Innovation Fellow, lots of my work is focused less so around research and teaching, which are the kind of, you know traditional academic roles, and much more around things like generating impact and partnership work. So I would say they’re kind of the two main areas of work that kind of make up some of that innovation kind of role.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Yeah, and that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you about the collaboration stream that we have would work. Because you have such an interesting role that is more like impact first research later, or that your focus is on the impact and you work very much with teachers on the ground assessing their needs and their expertise around what works and what doesn’t work, are there any challenges or opportunities you’ve noticed having this kind of impact focused work?

Time 4:45

Alison Buxton: My background has been kind of outside of academia a lot of my working life and so I bring lots of experiences from the commercial world; and also on having set up and run non-profit organisations as well, an importance of working really closely with other people and the world outside of academia in order to facilitate change and improve the world. You know there’s a lot of benefits in that close partnership relationship that this kind of innovation focused work kind of starts with. So by having a better understanding of the people that we work with – you know in my case that’s a lot of schools, teachers, other community organisations, places like museums and libraries; but also industry, and that crosses into other fields outside of education. So I work with people in the fields of Engineering and all sorts of areas, really understanding what their needs are, the difficulties that they are having in order to be able to help come up with innovative change and solutions together really. Yeah.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And have you noticed any major differences between the approaches to collaboration now that you work also in an academic setting coming from outside of academia? Is there maybe some translation work that needs to be done with your colleagues, or just different approaches to a collaboration means?

Alison Buxton: Like I say, I’ve come back into academia after a long time of being out so I’ve come at things a little bit differently and I’m not kind of stuck within kind of an academic mindset of doing things of how we ought to do things. So when I first started working for the university and I could see very clearly that there is kind of a process of, you know doing academic research and that is, you know on the whole generally if possible funded by a big pot of research funding and it has several outputs and things that come with that; and then on the end of that then is thought about kind of impact, what is the impact of that research. And it’s this quite kind of linear process.

But I came into academia, you know seeing the world a bit differently. And I think it’s also my dyslexic brain of basically seeing everything in 3D, or even more than 3D at all times, and more this kind of web of how things fit together and how relationships work and how problems emerge. And you know actually it’s very rarely linear. And for me, really meaningful research has to come out of close relationships with people so that you really know what it is that you want to research and things, and so it comes at things from a little bit of a different perspective.

I think the other thing that my dyslexic brain gives me is part of this 3D way of looking and experiencing the world from all angles at all times all together is the ability to see problems, see where things could be improved and all of the various pieces that feed into that. And like I say, that kind of web of those connections of how things work and how things could improve or how things could get better.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Doing this kind of collaborative work requires trust. I also made the point to mention that for collaborations to be effective we need to spend time building relationships, even outside of formal projects. This can take the form of small exchanges of services, like one-off workshops for the same group over a period of time.

It is difficult to parachute into a community and expect to produce meaningful impact. It is equally important to work towards establishing a project’s legacy so that its impact doesn’t stop when the researcher moves on.

Alison Buxton: I came into the university right at the very, very end of a research project. I wasn’t employed by that research project, I was something separate. In fact I was employed as part of the impact from that research project to be able to generate some impact from that. But I was very aware having been kind of outside of the university, particularly in my role directing a not-for-profit organisation, the difficulty it is to get funding and things. I used to look at all the amazing university projects with all this money thinking “wouldn’t that be nice”; but also being really disappointed when the funding stopped, the whole project, the whole infrastructure, everything just came to an end. And I used to think that that was such a waste, it was such a kind of a full-stop moment of “you know well the funding ran out so we don’t do that anymore”, and that used to grate on me a lot.

Time 10.00

So I was looking for a way to be able to capture the great work that had happened within this research project that I was coming in right at the tail end of and make sure that the legacies from that could still be accessed by schools and teachers and community educators around the world kind of beyond the life of the project. And not just through the project website that was still live and you could access it because you might have heard of it 3 years ago but actually that it became part of something greater than that.

So that was my motivation for the development of Maker{Futures}, which essentially is an entity, a brand, you know it’s a name and an identity where I was able to start to share ideas and build a community of practice and resources around Maker Education in the UK for teachers and community educators. But by having a brand and a name and a small website we’ve got something to offer, there’s a structure that schools or libraries, you know they can visit, they can feel kind of a part of it. It’s not just me as a person, as an academic, ringing and saying “we’d like to have a chat about this”, there’s a little bit more to it than that.

And through that website then we were able to, you know put up free resources and information, and it’s worthwhile them then going for that and being part of that. And that was quite a big part in a mechanism to help build that trust and build that…. It then goes beyond me, it goes beyond my abilities and we can then include other academics in that to help support that vision, or we could include other teachers in that to help support that vision. You know we can essentially make that community what we want it to be and what it needs to be when the time comes. Does that make sense?

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: That’s an excellent point about ensuring not only legacies of project but making sure that no one activity or innovation rests on the shoulder of a single person who might move on for a variety of reasons and then we lose all of that. A lot of what I’m working on in the WAARC project is how do we have institutional memory of things we’ve already done so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

But just to be clear, is the Maker{Futures} funded by the university or is it a separate entity at this point?

Alison Buxton: No, essentially it is funded by the university but it wasn’t a linear approach to a decision made to fund this thing. Essentially, the way that I developed it was to have the vision and have…. You know at the time I was employed on a short term contract to do a small piece of work, but I could see the potential. And I suppose this is my innovative brain on how kind of innovation works, and making things happen and making change, rather than thinking “is there an existing pathway that I fit into at the university”. Like there very rarely is for the way that my brain works and what I do, because I see those paths that people have not taken before, that’s what innovation is isn’t it, it’s doing the things that have not been done before.

So the way I could see a path was to essentially generate my own funding through lots of small pots, lots of small little projects, but together they feed into the same vision of Maker{Futures}. So they all had some kind of practical elements around Making involved in them, and they all had some link to education of some kind. So it might have been teacher professional development; it might have been children’s activities, you know what have you; it might have been Making within the field of Engineering; it might have been Making within the field of Computing and Digital Media and things; it might have been to do with a craft – and we’ve done things around kind of Embroidery and stuff. And they all fit within that realm of Making and supporting other Makers and supporting other educators as well to develop their practice.

So by developing these, by finding these small pots of funding, we were able to develop that further and bring on a few members of staff and everything. So for a long time it wasn’t funded by the university directly but as you gain traction and you can then start to show….not many people can understand the workings of my brain when I’m in that mode but eventually it gets to a point where people can see what you’re doing and that there is huge value in this. And at that point you can show your cards and say, this is great, this is a really good programme, this is real value, it’s having real impact, it’s got real opportunity for further research, x, y and z….don’t you think you ought to fund it? Or at least help us a little bit out with some staffing costs or…you know. And that’s how we then start to kind of, you know have been able to integrate it further into the School of Education.

Time 15:15

I don’t think I knew that that was what I was going to do before I started doing it. But I do think quite often there are so many barriers to change and things that you involve the procedures and the processes and other people, and quite often they can be the barriers. So by doing things small and organically it’s low risk essentially, you’re not having to persuade somebody of a big idea before you’ve even got started, you can just make those small changes and then before you know it you can show some really significant impact.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And just to wrap up, what is one recommendation you would give to someone building a collaborative team right now?

Alison Buxton: I think having kind of diversity in your team as well in terms of peoples’ experiences. You know I was able to come into the university having had a different set of work experiences. Everything works about ten times faster outside of academia than it does inside academia, you know things are very responsive, things are very….they have to be. And so I was able to bring some of that kind of knowledge in.

But equally I’m thinking about the kind of diverse brains as well, you know. I see the world and experience the world very much like this 3D web and that’s how I approach things. But I absolutely need people on my team who work linear and who are good with words because that’s how so many….like lots of other people who are not as fortunate to have as crazy a 3D web of a mind as me need to receive information.

So, you know I have difficulties in untangling the web in order to write a grant application, or untangling the web in order to make it understandable for people who unfortunately can only cope with the world in 2D, you know with one word after the next, after the next, in a long line. Like for some people they can only see the world like that. But that’s quite tricky for me to do. So you need a really diverse kind of team, wider team, partners, thought processors, ways of doing things, ways of seeing, and be really open to listening to those.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you very much Alison for sharing your experience and expertise. If you want to leave your comments about this episode you can message me on LinkedIn through the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture profile. I will leave a link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, this helps new listeners find the show.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

It’s my pleasure to introduce Emily Ennis, the Research Culture Manager at the University of Leeds to tell us more about her vision for Research Culture and the Research Culture Uncovered podcast.

Emily Ennis: Yeah, so the Research Culture Uncovered podcast is, well it’s lots of things, it’s sort of a mixture of personal history, like roles and how people have developed and how they’ve got into their roles, so the kind of interview style stuff. And then other episodes might focus on particular initiatives that have happened around Research Culture. So it’s kind of this “what is Research Culture?” I mean that’s not the question, but Uncovering Research Culture, I guess that’s per the title – but doing so in a way that’s kind of a mixture of personal history and actual “I am doing this project and it is funded by….” or, “I have done this initiative”. And there’s some really great stuff in it.

And often, as you might imagine those two things overlap. So someone will say “oh I had this really rubbish experience in my career, so I did this and now here’s the big change”. And it’s not just people in higher education, or in kind of research or a research profession role, so we get people in from, I guess adjacent to the sector, so maybe from funders. Or we’ve had people come on from the UK Research Integrity Office, things like that, everyone who is kind of in the, I guess the eco system of research we have come in to talk about research and research culture and how they’re experiencing it and what they’re doing to effect that change.

Time 20:00

So the topics are kind of wide-ranging, the podcasts. So we have someone who leads on impact stories, so stories around research impact. We have someone who looks at research integrity. We have a kind of strong focus on research development as well, how we develop our researchers and our research professionals.

My focus will be on “what do we mean when we say research culture change”, so looking at different models of change but not just metrics of change. So, you know what would it mean for example to look at research culture change from a reflective perspective, you know kind of reflecting on our journeys rather than thinking about “I have to hit this objective”. Or what happens if we took a different model, what if we took a kind of campaigner and activist model and applied it to research culture change, that sort of thing.

So I’m really hoping that in the episodes that I deliver there will be that kind of questioning around why we’re doing this and how we’re measuring it, which I did say when I was interviewed on my Meet the Host episode that I’m probably just going to provide my questions and answers. And maybe that’s a problem, but I just sort of think the more we get into research culture, you know the more we get into research culture work, the more we need to question what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

And I think that things like the REF and other ‘quality measures’ let’s call them, of research culture, have both this carrot and stick effect in that you know if you want to get….let’s say look at research culture as a component of funding. So there’s all these conversations at the moment about will research culture be factored into funding decisions from UK Research Councils. And on the one hand it’s like “if you have a great research culture you’ll get more money” – so carrot. But also like if you have a dreadful one you’ll be punished by having no money – so stick. And you’re just sort of like oh well that’s a really binary way of thinking about it.

And actually, like we’re probably going to have periods of time where research cultures are poor because of the context in which they’re operating, especially kind of economic contexts of which there are many at the moment, but also the thing is there will be some people who experience a real shift in research culture change and will experience it as quite a negative thing because they’re the people who mostly need to change. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not wholesale, good, it just means that for that particular moment in time it’s a bit rocky.

And even if you look at for example changing policies around research funding and making research culture a compulsory element to it, that’s going to be ‘core research culture’ for people who suddenly have to find all of this information and put it into a funding application. But what it does mean is, wholesale we’ll start to see improvements in research culture across the sector.

So that’s the sort of thing that, you know I want to I guess interrogate or have a think about, which is why we’re doing this. Because there’s lots of reasons, there’s lots of carrot and stick reasons and motives and de-motives for doing this sort of work. But, like what does change look like anywhere else, is that a thing that we should be looking at instead? And like I say, I think there’s so many parallels between what’s happening globally and what’s happening at that microcosm level of the higher education sector of the UK, I just sort of think that like why not look further afield, why not interrogate how we’re measuring this? Because we’ve got so much change that needs to happen that there’s probably, yeah quite a lot to reflect on and that bigger picture thinking to be done.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: What for you is the role of disability inclusion in research culture change?

Emily Ennis: We can’t just keep doing the easy stuff because it’s easy, we do eventually have to do the hard stuff. But that will mean research will benefit from this change. It’s not just about making people feel more included, though that’s lovely, that is great, you know I want people to want to come to work. But for those people who look upon disabled people, or queer people, or people from a minority ethnic background and go “oh well the reason you’re not succeeding is because you’re not working as hard” – like obviously I don’t ascribe to that belief but people have that belief. If you can say, if you can re-position that and say “yes, but if you include them you’ll get better research”, it’s a total game changer in terms of how they think about it.

So that’s the thing, is that people don’t always buy into that inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake, but if you can say “this can have real repercussions for how your research is conducted and how representative it is”, because I also think if you’re doing work with disabled people, or you’re not including disabled people in your work and then you’re presenting it as fact, it’s not is it, because it’s fact for people who aren’t disabled, not disabled people. So, you know you’ve not done good research. And when you start to kind of raise those questions I think people start to listen.

Time 25:00

So yeah I think the way of looking at research culture through that disability lens is to tap into that whole “you can’t do good research with one voice”, you know with the white male voice, that’s not how you do research, that doesn’t produce good research. That’s what the current system has led you to believe and that is not your fault, but if you want to do good innovative research you need to change how you do it.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And who do we need to reach to make structural changes happen?

Emily Ennis: Yeah. I mean I think doing the right thing is challenging, and that’s why like I say I want to make it as easy for people as possible. But I mean even for myself, like it’s taken me a really, really long time to come to terms with the fact that I am disabled. And even just that transition for me out of academia to professional services, which was precipitated by disability fundamentally, like you know I couldn’t keep up with my peers because the research culture expectations of me did not match my disabled body and mind and it just was never going to be compatible for me. Even in that transition I thought “I’m just a failure, I’ve just not been able to keep up with the people around me”.

And the people who are succeeding in academia, in research, I think certainly when you get to those most senior levels, are the people who have always benefitted from a kind of fundamentally oppressive system in that it’s a system that it privileges the most privileged people already. So when you, or I, or other disabled people say “I think you need to change this system so that good people like us don’t leave or don’t find it difficult” they (a) come to it with the lens of “maybe you’re just not trying hard enough”, which is exactly the thing that I’d internalized; but also (b) come to it with “well the system works fine for me”. And of course the system works fine for you.

But then they have to confront their abled-ness. And they find that unpleasant because they think they’ve got there through hard work. And don’t get me wrong, it is graft, serious graft to be an academic, whether you’re in an able body or a disabled body it is serious, serious hard work. But I think that most people who have kind of risen to the top in research think that they just got there from working really, really hard. And they did, they did work really, really hard but they also maybe didn’t have children, or you know weren’t ever really disabled, or didn’t experience other kind of inequities due to their identity for example.

So I think that’s the challenge I think for them is that kind of idea that research is a meritocracy. And I think for the most part it is. But there are still disabled people and people with other kind of protected characteristics exiting academia at every career stage. And I think once you can see that it’s very difficult to say that “oh you just have to work a bit harder”.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: What is the role that the Research Culture Uncovered podcasts plays in your work and what direction do you hope to take with it?

Emily Ennis: The one thing that I would love all my work but especially Research Culture Uncovered to do, is to tell people what doesn’t work. Because I don’t want them replicating it, it’s too much time and money wasted. So I think that one of the really big appeals of the podcast, and in sharing work more broadly, is that “guys, we tried this and it was rubbish – don’t do it, don’t do it, do something different”, or indeed “we did this, it was actually relatively easy to do, why don’t you do it too”.

And that’s the thing, you know because a lot of the interventions we make at Leeds, you know they’re powerful but we require sector-wide buy-in, we’re still struggling with the bigger system. You know there’s all sorts of inequities in publishing, in funding, in data and who has access to data, and how you can do public engagement and knowledge exchange and all that sort of stuff. But if we’re not sharing what does and doesn’t work and getting sector-wide input into that, both in terms of like coming on to the show and giving their perspective, but also listening to us and understanding it, then I don’t see how we’re going to solve those bigger challenges. So I think that’s the really great effort here is, we’re not waiting for a singular voice.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you Emily for speaking to me. You can find the Research Uncovered podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, or through the link in the show notes.

Until next time, bye.

Episode 7: Addressing Barriers to Inclusive Recruitment with Freya Douglas-Oloyede and Lucy Killerby

In this episode, Élaina is co-hosting with Armineh Soorenian, the lead on the Environment and Recruitment priority for WAARC. They are both joined by Freya Douglas-Oloyede and Lucy Killerby from , a company that specialises in optimising the inclusivity of recruitment processes.

Topics covered:

• The lack of consistent disability accommodations throughout the recruitment process as a significant barrier to hiring disabled applicants
• The importance of training managers in recruitment practices and the ‘License to Hire’ programme
• Examples of successful inclusive recruitment practices inside and outwith the higher education sector.

You can read the complete transcript by clicking this: ⁠

Message about the podcast:

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Cripping Research Culture is a ⁠⁠Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture (WAARC)⁠⁠ podcast. WAARC is hosted by the ����TV and is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Cripping Research Culture is produced, hosted, edited, and written by ⁠⁠.

Transcription is provided by Tina Cartwright.

Listen to this episode through this or wherever podcasts can be found.

British Sign Language Translation

Transcript

Lucy Killerby: You have to fulfill your obligations before you have the right to take part in recruitment. Because it’s such a high stakes process you are, you know really effectively, you know, dictating many peoples’ big life outcomes in whether or not they get the job. So a license to hire gives it the weight that it deserves.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Hello and welcome to Cripping Research Culture, a podcast where we asked the question “How can we make better working conditions for disabled staff in Higher Education?”

My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I will be your host. I am a light skinned Filipinx woman with short, dark, curly hair. I am also a Research Associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV where I am developing recommended actions to improve the inclusion of, and respect for, disabled staff.

In today’s episode I am joined by Armineh Soorenian, my colleague here at WAARC. Together we interviewed Lucy Killerby and Freya Douglas Oloyede from Talent Spaces, a company that focuses on helping their clients create more inclusive recruitment systems. Lucy founded Talent Spaces when she realised there was a gap between the number of marginalized or under-represented job seekers applying for jobs and the number that were being hired.

You’re about to hear a discussion about common barriers to hiring disabled people in the recruitment process from the job ad to the on-boarding phase; examples of successful policy implementation in and outside of higher education; as well as the emerging license to hire training for managers.

And don’t forget to stay until the end for the Crip Corner. We have a lot to cover, so without further ado my colleague Armineh Soorenian is here. Would you like to introduce yourself and your work on Priority Area 1?

Armineh Soorenian: Sure, thank you Élaina. So I am Armineh Soorenian as Élaina said. I am a research associate on the WAARC project, and I work on the employment strand of the project, so I am looking into the environment and the employment experience of disabled people at the ����TV. Thank you Élaina.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And we are joined today by Lucy and Freya both from Talent Spaces. Welcome.

Freya Douglas Oloyede: Thank you. Hello. Do you want to go first Lucy?

Lucy Killerby: Yeah, sure. It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you so much for the invitation to speak to you today. I’m Lucy and I’m the founder and CEO of a company called Talent Spaces, and yeah I’ve been leading this organisation for the last 6 years and looking forward to the conversation.

Freya Douglas Oloyede: And I’m Freya Douglas Oloyede and I’m a senior consultant in inclusive hiring with Talent Spaces, but I have a background working in the higher education sector as well.

Armineh Soorenian: I think I’m going to ask a question to Lucy and Freya about the barriers that you’ve witnessed with the clients who come to you at the recruitment stage. If you can maybe tell me about the barriers you have experienced at the recruitment stage?

Freya Douglas Oloyede: So the sorts of things we see in terms of the first stage, that talent attraction stage, is that often there isn’t a diverse pool of applicants, whether that be in terms of ethnicity or disability or gender, you know any of the different kind of protected characteristic groups under the Equality Act. So then we’re looking at ‘why is that?’ Is that to do with actually how they’re advertising that role? Is that to do with how the job description has been put together, the criteria, the role criteria, you know are they really kind of role relevant those criteria, are they focused on the core skills required for that role, or not? Are they really quite off-putting, you know?

And where are they advertising? So we see this a lot in terms of, you know going to the same old places. And I see this with universities. Universities love to use jobs.ac.uk, which is the classic platform isn’t it for university recruitment, but actually not every job seeker is going to know about that platform, you know. So it’s about, like, broadening where we’re advertising and making sure that that job advert is really focusing on the role of relevant criteria and skills required for the role, and is putting front and centre the values of the organisation in terms of being inclusive and bringing that diverse group of people to work for the organisation and focus on its culture etc. So making sure that that’s all, you know really kind of conveying an authentic picture of the organisation’s culture to support with the talent attraction stage.

Time 5:00

And then we move to looking at actually that sort of screening and short-listing stage. And we’re looking at are there any groups that are more likely to not be shortlisted there, you know what’s going on there, and if there is, you know why is that? Is there a consistent process in place for short-listing, for screening. Are they short-listing against the criteria, number one? Are they using a consistent approach? Are they using some kind of scoring matrix to help them to do that? Do they have more than one person doing the short-listing? You know there’s lots of different things that can go on there that can create barriers. You know if you’ve just got one person in isolation doing the short-listing and not doing it in a kind of robust and consistent approach that’s where issues can come in.

And then the interview process which is where we obviously see, you know lots of barriers can emerge during the interview process. Often organisations use quite a sort of rigid inflexible process in terms of interviews, you know they’re quite opaque in terms of what that process is going to look like, you know they’re not actually really informing the applicants about what’s going to happen, how long it’s going to take, where it’s going to take place, you know. All of these sorts of bits of information are really, really important to enable people to think ‘actually this is accessible for me, or if not then I could request an adjustment’ you know. But there’s often not so much information available around that place and what it’s going to look like.

And then in terms of adjustments. So is the organisation pro-actively making reasonable adjustments to that interview process? And you know that practice can be good in some places, but it can be quite patchy in other places. You know, how easy is it for a candidate to actually request an adjustment? Is there a clear process in place? Who do they contact? How do they do that? When, at what point in the process etc? Does the employer and the team involved in putting those adjustments in place, do they understand actually how to do that? Do they understand it’s a legal requirement as well? And do the candidates feel comfortable asking for those adjustments, you know? So there’s always a lot to explore in terms of how an organisation is clearly communicating their provision of reasonable adjustments and how they’re enabling and implementing adjustments as well in the interview process.

And then I suppose we move on to, after the interview process we move on to the job offer stage. So again it’s about looking at all of the practices around that and thinking about actually how….is salary history considered at that stage and does that disadvantage anyone who has historically actually been underpaid in their roles? And lots of marginalized or under-represented groups will have been in lower paid roles in the past for a variety of different reasons of course. How can we enable an organisation not to really focus on salary history for example when they’re deciding on salary?

And then moving into the on-boarding phase and ensuring that those individuals who are hired have all of the information and the support in place that they need to be able to feel a part of that organisation, know where to go to if they do need to request any reasonable adjustments etc. So yes we try to look at this in a really holistic way from end to end in terms of this process.

Lucy Killerby: I would say, yeah there are lots of different barriers present and I would say that Freya’s covered most of them. But from a recent audit one that’s come up again and again is a lack of, just to kind of highlight what Freya said, the lack of reasonable adjustments in terms of not only at the start but at every single stage. You are giving people the opportunity to request that again and again, because there is a real fear of discrimination from candidates, disclosure rates can be particularly low amongst public sector organisations particularly, so it’s just creating that psychological safety around not just leaving it at the bottom of an email or saying it once, but consistently asking about adjustments.

And sometimes also saying ‘why?’, you know ‘what is the purpose?’ and even at the disclosure phase. And that can really help telling that story around inclusive culture and wanting everyone to feel they’re protected in the process. So I would say those are things that keep coming up in some recent audits that we’ve done.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: And so do you have any examples of successful implementations you’ve seen throughout your work?

Time 10:00

Freya Douglas Oloyede: We have seen lots of, you know successful implementations, but I think the key ingredients I would say of those can sort of tell you quite a lot about what you need to do to actually make something turn into a reality if you like, rather than the specific sort of examples. Number one, I’ve always seen it be most effective when an organisation has involved people with lived experience to input to the development of that policy or that project whatever it is and to the implementation of it. So ensuring that in a university setting the staff networks for example, there’s often a disability focused staff network that can be a really, really valuable consultation mechanism. So you know, going to those networks and getting their input I’ve seen be very effective, and in terms of making sure that actually what’s decided on in terms of the actions are actually what’s needed, you know.

And then the other thing I would say is that it’s not about just having a policy, that’s just the beginning, it’s about everything that is needed to go around that. So if we’re talking about recruitment then it’s looking at those systems and those processes and providing people with the tools to deliver those consistently and inclusively. So whether that’s a playbook, or guidance, whether it’s banks of interview questions or scoring rubrics, which I’ve mentioned before as well, it’s actually the how and the tools to help people do it. As well as the training, I think the training on its own in isolation isn’t enough, it has to be supported by these other tools.

And then ensuring that data is being collected and analysed as well to monitor actually, you know how effective is this policy. And not just the quantity of data in terms of, you know applicants’ different characteristics but also feedback, you know candidate feedback data to understand what is that experience, what are the potential….or what are the actual barriers people are experiencing. Making sure that we’re collecting this information so we can continue to understand how well this is working, what else do we need to do next? Senior level commitment and buy-in to the policy or the project I find absolutely essential for getting the resources needed to actually implement it in the organisation and hold people accountable. So I think those are the key ingredients.

And in terms of some specific examples in the higher education sector, I worked with Newcastle University a few years ago actually while they were developing an inclusive recruitment strategy. I think what was really effective about that is, they sort of took a similar approach to what we are doing at Talent Spaces in terms of really doing a sort of self-assessment, looking across, or an audit looking across the whole of this process and bringing in lots of data and information, and consulting with staff networks and their EDI committee to really understand where are we going wrong here and how could we improve this?

And then for each stage of the process they identified some actions and put together an action plan. So that included things like improvements to job description; using agenda de-coders to identify potential gender coded language; broadening where they were advertising their roles. They joined Disability Confidence, which they hadn’t done before and they provided improved guidance materials for all of their recruitment team, but also for hiring managers. So it was all about the tools to role that out as well. So I think that is quite a good example of actually how you can bring it all together in a university setting.

And then in terms of a non-university example, we have recently been working with a multi-national telecommunications company through our certification process. And they actually have a 5 year accessibility road map aimed at embedding accessibility across all of their functions globally but that has included recruitment as well. And they have been working really closely with their DAN group, their Disability and Accessibility Network in order to create that road map and to help them as they roll it out. So they have digital accessibility principles for everything that they are doing now; guidance for online accessibility; and they also have accessibility champions across the business, which they are finding to be quite effective in terms of enabling local implementation. Because particularly in a very big company that’s operating globally, you know you absolutely need those touch points in different settings to help with that.

So you know we’ve been really, really impressed with that example. And they’re in Year 2 of that road map and we are excited to see what comes next with that one.

Time 15:00

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: One thing that really strikes me is that, you know obviously your whole company is devoted to this, but the average academic who is charged with recruiting, when we are talking about a research culture will maybe not have thought twice about all of the different steps that are involved here. And it makes me think that there’s so much work to be done kind of upstream before even the job advert is crafted and goes out. And this idea of transparency, I think a lot of people can resonate with the fact as a job seeker you feel there is sometimes a secret criteria that the person who crafted the advert has in mind but they don’t know how to articulate that into something that’s clear and actually measureable. So I know when we chatted last time you mentioned something called License to Hire training for managers. Would you be able to expand on that?

Lucy Killerby: Yeah. So the License to Hire programme is, I think it’s a way of embedding best practice and having a structured system for engaging with recruitment. And I also like the way that it positions inclusive recruitment as you have to fulfill your obligations before you have the right to take part in recruitment. Because it’s such a high stakes process you are, you know really effectively dictating many peoples’ big life outcomes in whether or not they get the job. So a License to Hire gives it the weight that it deserves in that you need to go through those training, you need to be up-skilled in the best approach to interviewing and assessing someone. And only when you’ve done that rigorous training, you know understood the policies and the reasons why, do you then get to take part in recruitment and you’re able to.

And some organisations uses it as a really key governance process because…for various reasons. So if you think legally there was a claim, a discrimination claim, if you can show that you’ve had a License to Hire programme you’ve almost got that audit trail that everyone has been trained. And some organisations will not let you raise a requisition on the system and even start the process without having that training. And so it’s a great governance tool but it’s also a way of making sure that the training is completed.

So yes, License to Hire programme is very popular, increasingly so as well, lots of organisations within the public sector are facilitated. But also insurance, we’ve seen a few organisations do it. And all it effectively means, and for each company it’s different, so it might be that you have some e-learning, a module which could be an hour, it could be two hours, and that is usually scenario based training, compliance training. And you will need to complete that online before you’re able to take part.

Other organisations do something a bit more comprehensive which could be a day or half a day with their colleagues in person, and they will go through more scenario based challenges and things like that. And others will do a blend so that they get the key information but you also have that session with managers. And yeah I think it’s a great programme. And of course the training has to be engaging and inspirational and hopefully helps people to reflect back on why it’s so important. It’s a really great system for ensuring good governance, best practice, and ultimately everyone’s had the same training. So it doesn’t obviously guarantee bias free outcomes but it’s a good approach to ensuring that your hiring population have the right skills from the get-go.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril: Thank you very much Lucy and Freya for sharing your experience and expertise. If you want to leave your comments about this episode you can message me on LinkedIn through the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture profile. I will leave a link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, this helps new listeners find the show.

This episode of Cripping Research Culture was hosted by me, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and Armineh Soorenian. Production, writing and audio engineering is done by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

Cripping Research Culture is part of the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the ����TV and it is made possible through funding from the Wellcome Trust.

Time 20:00

Today’s Crip Corner is about cripistemologies. Cripistemology is a port-manteau or combination between the words ‘crip’ and ‘epistemology’, or the science of knowledge. Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer coined the term to describe the kind of knowledge disabled people have from their experience living in a world that isn’t made for them. Whether it’s working, loving or socializing disabled people have to find ways through, around or under barriers in creative ways, if they can. Because sometimes we can’t. This shapes the way that we disabled people view, understand and change the world. In this episode Freya talks about the importance of involving people with lived experience of marginalization when we audit and re-design our recruitment systems. This is because those of us who bang up against barriers repeatedly are best placed to identify them and to dream up alternatives.